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Wednesday 22nd March 2006

New vulnerability in IE uncovered 10:42AM, Wednesday 22nd March 2006

A security researcher has discovered a new vulnerability in Internet Explorer 6. Specially crafted HTML tags built into a web page can cause IE to crash.

In a security notification, Michal Zalewski writes 'This might not come as a surprise, but there appears to be a *very* interesting and apparently very much exploitable overflow in Microsoft Internet Explorer'.

The vulnerability



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is caused by an array boundary error in the handling of HTML tags with multiple event handlers. According to security firm Secunia, by specifying a tag with 94 or more event handlers IE will then attempt to write memory array out of bounds.

Zalewski says the exploit works with a fully patched version of Internet Explorer 6 with Windows XP Service Pack 2. Other browsers such as Firefox and Opera are not susceptible to the flaw. Nevertheless, Secunia has marked the exploit as 'non-critical'.

Microsoft says it is aware of the problem and is looking into it. However, given the 'non-critical' nature of the vulnerability, the earliest a fix is likely to appear is on the next 'patch Tuesday' in April.

Anyone who feels like experiencing the exploit themselves Zalewski offers a site where visitors can crash their browser.

Steve Malone

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