New In-the-Wild Exploit for IE Zero Day

New In-the-Wild Exploit for IE Zero Day

With the arrival of an out-of-band security patch from Microsoft to fix a critical Internet Explorer zero day vulnerability, Symantec has also confirmed that a new exploit for the security hole, which was used in the recent high-profile attacks against Google, has been discovered in the wild.

“The new exploit is being hosted on hundreds of Web sites and Symantec detects the malicious HTML pages as Trojan.Malscript!html,” said Josh Talbot, security intelligence manager, Symantec Security Response. “The pages contain a shell code that bypasses a warning dialog shown after downloaded file gets executed. The page replaces the code of “MessageBeep API” so that the Internet Explorer process which attempts to play a beep sound will be terminated. After the termination of the process, it causes the Internet Explorer window to be displayed again. The shell code also contains code to avert API hooking when it calls APIs. By doing this, some security products may miss some monitored APIs.”

In the end, a malicious file is downloaded. Symantec has both network-based and antivirus signatures to protect against this threat and detects the malware as Trojan Horse. This is not the same malware, Trojan.Hydraq, that was used in the recent attacks waged against Google.

Symantec strongly advises computer users to update their systems with the related patch from Microsoft. More information on the security patch can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms10-jan.mspx.

In addition, for the most up-to-date information about the Trojan.Hydraq threat which also takes advantage of this vulnerability, please see http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/hydraq-vnc-connection.

Please let me know if you’d like to discuss this further with a Symantec security expert, and I will be happy to put you in touch.

Media Contact:

Jasmin Athwal

Max Australia

+61 2 9954 3492

Jasmin.Athwal@maxaustralia.com.au