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Windows mouse house under attack from animated cursor flaw
Information Technology News
Windows mouse house under attack from animated cursor flaw | Windows mouse house under attack from animated cursor flaw |
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| by Stan Beer | |
| Sunday, 01 April 2007 | |
Microsoft has sounded the alarm about a new zero day security flaw which exploits a vulnerability in the way Windows handles animated cursor (.ani) files. Featured Whitepaper
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Animated cursors are a feature that allows an animation loop instead of single image to appear where the mouse cursor is positioned on the screen. The Animated Cursors feature is designated by the .ani suffix. While all versions of Windows could be affected, including Vista, earlier versions including Windows XP Service Pack 2 are probably more vulnerable because of their ubiquity in the user community and the fact that they offer two avenues of attack - websites and email. Vista blocks off the website route because Internet Explorer 7 runs in protected mode. However, if a user opens a crafted HTML email in Vista the system could be infected and taken over by a hacker, although no email exploits have yet been discovered. Reports say that users running the Fire Fox browser from Mozilla have not yet been targeted. According to Microsoft, the newly discovered vulnerability will require an update patch. It is likely to be issued during this month's patching cycle. {moscomment} |
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