This may sound bad...
...but I dont suppose any of you have any examples of this in the wild?
Rather than go debug this myself, I might as well steal the existing code.
Security researchers are reporting in-the-wild attacks targeting a previously unknown vulnerability in fully patched versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. They surfaced on the same day that Microsoft released its biggest batch of security patches in five years. Internet users located in China report infections …
I don't believe the term means what you think it means. To me, "hardened" means "close to impenetrable". What Microsoft does is more like "vaguely firm, sort of", but definitely not "hardened". It's like the difference between "carbon steel alloy 1090" and "firm tofu", with Microsoft's offerings more on the "firm tofu" end of things.
Pierre, I doubt many of the affected users _didn't_ have updated anti-malware. The real problem is that most users update their virus-definition files AFTER an outbreak has occured. In this story, McAfee started investigating after the outbreak.... Much, much, too late.
So anti-malware is not the answer. At least not to any question I can think of.
Browsing with javascript disabled OTOH, has saved me lots of grief. (and apparently protects me against this threat as well)
But, IE7, under Vista, runs with reduced priviligies. The Register neglects to mention whether this helped or not. I would be surprised if it didn't. (but this story wasn't limited to Vista, so XP users are out of luck in either csae)
..anything other than Internet Explorer - why do you people still use this arcane crap?
For all their noise, they obviously have done little to fix the underlying code base insecurities, and for christ's sake - what's wrong with these idiots, sequencing and catching calls to malloc() and free() really isn't rocket science. It's called memory management guys - give it a try some time.
Paris - because I bet even she remembers who she's malloc()ed.
>like Firefox or Opera have no security holes
Er, that's not the point. The point is that patches are usually released quickly once a problem is discovered, and they tend to work. Microsoft tend to leave IE wide open to exploits for weeks or months, and quite often produces half-hearted, half-finished or untested patches.
To be fair, we're approaching the point where the only viable "patch" for IE security (and in fact, functionality and standards) is for MS to replace the core .exe file with a something that just pops a message box with "you can download <insert list of 5 "best" browsers> by clicking here"
The problem with IE7 is that they disabled DEP by default. Why? Many plugins (Flash, Java VM, QuickTime, etc) require/required DEP to be disabled, because they depend on executing code from memory pages not marked as read-only/execute.
http://blogs.technet.com/bluehat/archive/2008/04/28/the-battle-for-the-browser-your-pc.aspx
So blame Adobe for being late with DEP support. Blame Sun. Blame Apple. Etc... They are the ones making IE7 a viable target. :(
At home I disable activex, java and javascript. Problem solved.