It looks like there is a fairly serious vulnerability in some of the popular media player packages out in the wild packaged as a MP4 file (due to the MP4 codec from 3ivx), it effects Windows Media Player 6.4 and Windows Media Player Classic, which are made by Microsoft, and AOL’s Winamp version 3.5.

All the more reason to use VLC! This follows fairly shortly after a couple of quite serious vulnerabilities in Quicktime.

Security researchers are warning that popular media players offered by Microsoft and AOL are vulnerable to attacks that can completely compromise a user’s PC.

Attack code has already been released for the bug, which has been confirmed in a codec used by older versions of Windows Media Player, made by Microsoft, and in AOL’s Winamp. A Symantec researcher has warned that users of other players may also be at risk because the vulnerability itself resides in a commonly used MP4 codec produced by a company called 3ivx Technologies.

“The exploit works by supplying victims with a maliciously formed MP4 file,” Raymond Ball wrote for Symantec’s DeepSight Threat Management System. “When a victim unknowingly clicks a link that appears safe, the MP4 content is delivered, causing the exploit to run.”

At least it’s not Microsoft’s fault this time, but they did use a dodgy codec so I guess some of the blame lays with them right?

They could have checked it out properly before bundling it into their software.

A researcher who goes by the name SYS 49152 released exploit code here, here and here that targets Windows Media Player 6.4 and Windows Media Player Classic, which are made by Microsoft, and AOL’s Winamp version 3.5. Each uses the 3ivx MP4 codec, which is vulnerable to a stack overflow.

Secunia describes the Windows Media Player vulnerabilities as “highly critical,” the second-highest rating on Secunia’s five-tier scale. The vulnerability reporting service didn’t have a rating for the Winamp vulnerability.

No patch is available. Ball recommends users remove the codec or disable media players that use the MP4 codec until the hole is plugged. That strikes us as overkill. Taking care not to click on suspicious links in browsers and email programs should suffice.

So watch out, attack vectors are getting more varied – don’t let your guard down during this merry season.

Source: The Register

An interesting snippet from last month, AOL seems to have a strangely configued password system.

Users can enter up to 16 characters as a password, but the system only reads the first 8 and discards the rest. They are basically truncating the password at 8 characters.

A reader wrote in Friday with an interesting observation: When he went to access his AOL.com account, he accidentally entered an extra character at the end of his password. But that didn’t stop him from entering his account. Curious, the reader tried adding multiple alphanumeric sequences after his password, and each time it logged him in successfully.

It turns out that when someone signs up for an AOL.com account, the user appears to be allowed to enter up to a 16-character password. AOL’s system, however, doesn’t read past the first eight characters.

And if you can’t work out what’s wrong with this..well.

How is this a bad set-up, security-wise? Well, let’s take a fictional AOL user named Bob Jones, who signs up with AOL using the user name BobJones. Bob — thinking himself very clever — sets his password to be BobJones$4e?0. Now, if Bob’s co-worker Alice or arch nemesis Charlie tries to guess his password, probably the first password he or she will try is Bob’s user name, since people are lazy and often use their user name as their password.

And she’d be right, in this case, because even though Bob thinks he created a pretty solid 13-character password — complete with numerals, non-standard characters, and letters — the system won’t read past the first eight characters of the password he set, which in this case is exactly the same as his user name. Bob may never be aware of this: The AOL system also will just as happily accept BobJones for his password as it will BobJones$4e?0 (or BobJones + anything else, for that matter).

Not smart eh? AOL apparently are ‘looking into it’ and that’s all they’ve said regarding the matter.

Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer BT Counterpane, called the set-up “sloppy and stupid.”

Source: Washington Post