WMF exploit through indexing software



One of the vectors that has been mentioned early on is the infection of a system through the WMF exploit even when the exploited file was downloaded through a dos command shell. At first this seemed absurd, but it appeared that Google Desktop search was indexing files dynamically and once the file was downloaded it indexed the file and triggered the vulnerability. There is word that Microsoft’s indexing service does likewise – although Microsoft has only said that they’re “looking into reports”. Incidents.org is saying that they think this may be the giant white elephant no one is talking about. I certainly would shudder to think if machines on a network are indexing a network share and manage to subvert every machine running an indexing share….


Along the same lines… in the Kaspersky labs viruslist blog, they note that they suspect the vulnerability isn’t actually within shimgvw.dll even though unregistering it works around the problem in some cases. They note that given that other apps can be exploited EVEN WITH THE unregister workaround, that the flaw is likely in gdi32.dll

This makes sense in light of the third party patch that I reported on earlier. That patch works around the problem by disabling the SETABORT escape functionality in gdi32.dll (Who knows this could be the foundation of an official Microsoft patch, although there may be other breakage from this disabling.)

   Send article as PDF