back to article Black hats target Windows Media Encoder bug

Miscreants have wasted no time exploiting a critical hole in Microsoft's Windows Media Encoder. Just four days after Redmond released fixes for that flaw and seven others, security experts found attack code in the wild that preys on users who have yet to install the patch. Public attack code was published on the Milw0rm …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oh look at me mummy I am a cowboy

    Black hats, white, grey even, oh gosh won't they just grow up.

    You know what I find funny is the script kiddie one. See, if you think about it, most Admins are like script kiddies, they don't produce software they just run software others have constructed - just like a script kiddie :)

    People are compromising nowadays for power and money, and they often have physical backing. Not sure the days of name calling are really appropriate anymore.

    Still a collective noun is required and well frankly no one wants crackers, and hackers is just lamo on an epic fail of all fails.

    So, how about compromisers, reverse engineers. I am not sure there even needs to be a moral spin on the matter, it is just an activity, in some countries it will be illegal unless you own the devices, in other places not. And the legality will also depend on the authority a person has been given. The morality is subjective as always.

    Or how about if you are going to use the term, you have to wear that colour of Sowestern for an entire day.

  2. adnim

    ActiveX again

    One would have thought that ms would have realised that ActiveX is so broken that the technology will be obsolete before it is fixed. It is no good me or a respected security team saying don't use IE and don't use WMP, the message will not reach the parts the message needs to reach, namely the average IT illiterate user. I would hope readers of the Reg are sufficiently clued up as to not need this kind of advice. Mediaplayer classic and Firefox, less worry. If I cannot see/hear a media file with these products, then I don't see or hear it.

    We need less bug ridden proprietary code in public user space, it should be a criminal offence to release code that can be exploited in such a way.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    @adnim

    "We need less bug ridden proprietary code in public user space, it should be a criminal offence to release code that can be exploited in such a way"

    In that case 99% of software out there is illegal, regardless if it is proprietary or OS.

    People just need to get over it. All software has bugs and the majority has some sort of security issues. In an ideal world they wouldn't, but in an ideal world, I wouldn't be stuck at work wanting to win the lottery

  4. Gordon Fecyk
    Stop

    So why isn't Sean Hittel (Symantec) doing something about it?

    "This attack chronology is another example of the rapid adoption of public exploits into widely deployed exploit toolkits," Symantec researcher Sean Hittel writes here.

    So... why isn't Symantec doing something about it, hmmmmm? Don't we pay these creeps to protect our PCs from malware that exploits this?

    Oh wait... we expect AV to fail here, don't we? http://www.vmyths.com/column/1/2003/6/11/

    adnim, stop blaming the messenger. Again. It's trivially easy to curb ActiveX controls and still have them work as designed. Try turning UAC back on in your Vista PC, and using a nonadmin account like you're supposed to.

    Dan, this is old, old, old news by now. You're blaming Microsoft for a bug they fixed already. You hold MS to a double standard compared to Symantec, who fixes their broken software far more often than MS has to.

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