Researchers penetrate last bastion of Windows security

Added by: Steve Fung, Wed 3rd Feb 2010, 22:36:53

Security researchers have defeated vulnerability protections baked into the latest versions of Internet Explorer, demonstrating that it's possible to poke holes in a safety net that's widely relied on to keep end users safe from drive-by exploits.

By exploiting weaknesses in Adobe Systems' Flash Player, researchers have devised two separate attacks that bypass mitigations Microsoft put into IE 7 and 8. Known as ASLR, or address space layout randomization, and DEP, or data execution prevention, the technologies are designed to lessen the severity of bugs by making it hard for them to cause the execution of malicious code.

source: The Register