RealPlayer zero-day flaw exploited

Manufacturer responds rapidly to serious security hole.

A zero-day vulnerability in the popular media playing system

RealPlayer

was spotted being exploited in the wild late last week, with several trojans penetrating vulnerable systems from malicious websites in silent drive-by downloads.

The flaw is in a piece of code previously exploited to cause denial of service, but thought to be safe from remote code exploitation until this discovery. Responding speedily to warnings posted on the

Symantec

blog and elsewhere, manufacturer

RealNetworks

managed to turn around an update to fix the problem the same day.

The exploit uses

ActiveX

and thus only affects

Windows

users running

Internet Explorer

. The patch, available from

Real


here

, works for version 10.5 and the beta of version 11 recently made available, and any users still running earlier versions are advised by

Real

to upgrade to the latest edition and apply the patch to ensure they are safe from exploitation.

Details of the attack are on the

Symantec

blog

here

or at

McAfee


here

.

Those

Windows

users who choose to shun popular exploitation target

Internet Explorer

in favour of other browsers should beware of feeling too smug however. Both

Opera

and

Firefox

require patching after a series of fixes for important security issues were released last week. Overviews of the problems, and the updates to fix them, are at

Secunia


here

(for

Firefox

) and

here

(for

Opera

).

Posted on 22 October 2007 by

Virus Bulletin