Trojans sneaking in through animated cursor flaw.
A vulnerability has been discovered in the handling of .ani files, used for animated cursors on web pages and in HTML emails, and has been spotted as a proof-of-concept exploit on malware writers’ discussion boards and in use for attacks.
The exploit involves maliciously crafted .ani files, implanted on web pages or spammed via email, and can be used to silently install trojans on victim machines. After an initial blog posting from
McAfee
(
here
), exploitation of the flaw has been reported by numerous sources and
Microsoft
has issued an initial security advisory. Users of most current versions of
Windows
, including
Windows Vista
, are thought to be affected, although the exploit may not work on
Windows XP
without Service Pack 2, and the
Firefox 2
and
Internet Explorer 7
browsers are also thought to be protected from the flaw.
Users are advised to allow only plain-text email, although this may not protect users of the popular
Outlook Express
, or the
Windows Live Mail
program included with
Vista
. Administrators may want to consider blocking .ani files at the gateway.
Microsoft
‘s advisory is
here
, while an update to
McAfee
‘s blog posting is
here
and some analysis of an exploit from
Trend Micro
is
here
. An alert from the
SANS Internet Storm Centre
can be found
here
, and another from
Secunia
, labelled ‘extremely critical’, is
here
.
Posted on 30 March 2007 by
Virus Bulletin
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