Microsoft patches long-known Windows bugs

Computerworld - Microsoft Corp. today patched four vulnerabilities in two security updates for Windows and Office, including a critical bug that had been publicly disclosed nearly two years ago.

The most serious of the two updates, MS08-069, fixed three separate flaws in XML Core Services, the component that not only provides interoperability between several scripting languages -- including JScript and Visual Studio -- and XML applications, but more importantly allows Internet Explorer to render XML-based content.

"The name says it all," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security Inc. "This is a core service for all versions of Microsoft Windows, and it will certainly be a source of research for attackers."

Other security experts agreed. "The XML Core Services vulnerability is more of a concern, because it will have more of an opportunity to be exploited," said Ben Greenbaum, a senior research manager at Symantec Corp., referring to the over-the-Internet vector that attackers could take to leverage the flaw.

"It affects most versions of Windows," echoed Amol Sarwate, manager of Qualys Inc.'s vulnerabilities research lab. "It's much more mainstream than the other, but it would require some kind of user intervention, so wormable code is not likely."

Of the three bugs patched in MS08-069, the only one named "critical" was pegged with a CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) label in early 2007, and according to Microsoft, went public more than 22 months ago.

At that time, noted Polish security researcher Michal Zalewski, who now works for Google Inc., posted details about several Internet Explorer flaws to the Bugtraq mailing list. Zalewski also pointed out that he had first brought up the problem six months before that, when he described a flaw in Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox and said that other browsers were unlikely to be immune.

The vulnerability turned out to be not in IE itself, but in a service it relies on, XML Core Services, Greenbaum said. He and the other researchers, however, were at a loss to explain, if some information had been released in early 2007, why hackers had not exploited the bug.

But they had ideas.

"Perhaps the skill level [needed by the hacker] was high," Storms said. "There might have also been enough mitigating factors to make it difficult to exploit."

Sarwate seconded that. "According to Microsoft's Exploitability Index, it involves a race condition," he said, "which means the reliability of an exploit really depends on what other resources are available on the target. In other words, an exploit might not work on every machine."

This is the second month that Microsoft has posted estimates in its Exploitability Index of how likely it is that attack code would be generated in the next 30 days. The company pinned the Zalewski bug with its second-highest ranking: "inconsistent exploit code likely."