IE on Insinuator.net - Bold Statements

The Role of VGX.DLL in the Context of the Latest IE 0-Day

Tue, 13 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

On Saturday, April 26 Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer version 6 until version 11 is under potential risk against drive-by attacks from malicious websites, regardless of the underlying Microsoft operating system and the associated memory protection features integrated with the operating system. Microsoft has assigned CVE-2014-1776 to this unknown use-after-free vulnerability, which in the worst case could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted website. If an attacker successfully exploits this vulnerability, s/he will gain the same rights and privileges as the current user (once again, activated User Account Control [UAC] helps keeping privileges of the user low).

Microsoft Advisory 2757760: Windows Internet Explorer Zero-Day Vulnerability

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Actually a Windows Vulnerability (Microsoft Advisory 2757760) related to the Internet Explorer Version 7, 8 and 9 is in the news. Microsoft is aware of the problem, but there’s no patch available yet. We call this a 0-Day :-). Making the problem even worse, on monday reliable exploit code was released within the Metasploit project, so exploit code is already in the wild.

Basically Microsoft suggests two workarounds:

Usage of EMET (Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit)
Disabling Active X and Active Scripting in the Internet Settings

But both of them have some impact: EMET must be deployed before any usage (btw. EMET can be configured via Group Policies) and disabling Active X and Active Scripting might break some business relevant web sites (that can be added to the “Trusted Sites” Zone, but might produce major operational effort).

MS10-063, Prevention

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

One of the four vulnerabilities rated “critical” from yesterday’s MS patchday, that is MS10-063, has an interesting “Workarounds” section as for MS Internet Explorer. There it’s stated:

“Disabling the support for the parsing of embedded fonts in Internet Explorer prevents this application from being used as an attack vector.”

which, according to the advisory, should/can be done by setting the “Font Downloading” parameter to “Disable”.

Which is exactly what this document suggests. So taking a preventive approach, once more, might have saved some concerns (“Will we be targeted by this one”) and patch/testing time…