Computers

Advisory by USSR: "It is possible to create a malicious webpage that when visited by an IE user all of their system resources are devoured and depending on the system its possible that the machine can even crash and reboot itself."

Includes: MSXML may ignore IE security zone settings during a request for data from a Web site; and a VBscript problem which allows an attacker to read files on a victim's local drive, or eavesdrop on his browsing session.

A fairly serious flaw in Internet Explorer which would enable a malicious Web page or e-mail to drop a cookie containing an HTML script on a victim's machine and run it in the 'Local Computer' zone rather than the Internet zone to avoid restrictions has just been patched.

An attacker can run arbitrary commands on Windows machines with a simple bit of HTML, an Israeli security researcher has demonstrated. The exploit will work with IE, Outlook and Outlook Express even if active scripting and ActiveX are disabled in the browser security settings.

The MS patch intended to fix a data binding flaw in IE, which enables a script to call executables on your Windows machine using the object tag, does not protect against malicious files launched from a local directory.

"Microsoft is urging users of its Internet Explorer browser to download a patch for a newly discovered buffer-overflow security bug. The bug takes advantage of the way some versions of the IE browser handle long strings of JScript code."