The list of serious unpatched vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser keeps getting longer and longer.
Less than a week after researcher Michal Zalewski went public with a new zero-day vulnerability that could be used in code execution attacks, the software maker has acknowledged yet another flaw affecting fully patched Windows systems.
The new IE flaw was discovered by Secunia researcher Andreas Sandblad during code analysis into the Zalewski warning.
In fact, Secunia initially reported its findings to Microsoft as a “successful exploit” of that bug, but according to Microsoft’s internal investigations, Secunia actually found a new problem.
“This is potentially a new, privately reported, exploitable vulnerability,” a Microsoft spokesperson told eWEEK.
Secunia has since updated its advisory with a note that its discovery is a “variant” of the bug reported by Zalewski.
The flaw is due to a memory corruption error when processing a specially crafted HTML script that contains malformed “object” tags, and could be exploited by attackers to remotely take complete control of an affected system by convincing a user to visit a specially crafted Web page.
“[We have] confirmed code execution on a fully patched system with Internet Explorer 6.0 and Microsoft Windows XP SP2. Other versions may also be affected. Details about this variant will not be publicly disclosed at present, but have been sent to Microsoft, who is currently working on a patch,” the company said.
Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Internet Explorer Security Problems Multiply
