Epidemic?

[thedarkproject]

Ace. http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=&q=WMF

New Windows vulnerability: one person says that "This is one of the worst, if not the worst in the history of this operating system." Basically your computer can be completely compromised just by viewing an image, for example on a web site you're reading. If you're lucky, it'll just install spyware or use your computer to send junk emails. If someone gets really malicious, they could probably write code to delete your hard disk contents or whatever. No firewall or spyware-removal can help here.

Microsoft expect to issue a patch for this on Jan 10th - about 2 weeks after it was first seen, which is pretty dire really. Some nice guy has provided his own patch though, which can allegedly be found here, if you can get the site to respond. Install it if you can. (EDIT: It's also available here. You can uninstall it when Microsoft get around to issuing their own fix.)

One source says, "Internet Explorer will view the image and trigger the exploit without warning. New versions of Firefox will prompt you before opening the image." Worth thinking about. I may just use Linux until I can get my new computer. :)

Comments

[iced-arctica.livejournal.com]

your icon is grand!!

[ironlord.livejournal.com]

The question is... who uses WMF images on websites?

Answer: virus writers do... at least, they do now.

[ironlord.livejournal.com]

And that hexblog.com site "has been suspended".

I'll bet that's due to Bill Gate$ getting pissed off that someone's tried to fix his operating system before he's had a chance to let the virus win...

[thedarkproject]

Too much traffic to the site. It's back up now, supposedly.

[velvetchamber.livejournal.com]

Charming that.

[bedlamborn.livejournal.com]

Thats why one should not use IE to view images...

[thedarkproject]

It can affect you in other ways though, which is a bit of a worry. For example, if a browser downloads it automatically to a temporary directory, and then something like Google Desktop indexes it for the quick search, then you can get infected before you even click the 'do not download' button on your browser.

[bedlamborn.livejournal.com]

I am still sitting on my Win 98 machine...

But that thing is not good. Maybe one should use Opera and put the setting on do not download any pictures but that would make internet so boring.

[jen-whitewave.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this, as a non geek I appreciate these warnings, and have switched to Firefox!

[thedarkproject]

It surprised me at how long it took for me to find out about it, to be honest. I suppose there is no central place for such information unless you subscribe to one of the boring computer security sites.

[velvetchamber.livejournal.com]

Well, they did come around and release it earlier, to be found here.

[thedarkproject]

I notice they didn't give any thanks to the guy who wrote and distributed the previous patch that protected many of their customers. Grr.

It does say that Win98 SE isn't significantly affected by the problem, which is nice for me. It would be better to have an update though.