Fiendish Internet Explorer 10 zero-day targets US soldiers

Cyberspies have used an unpatched vulnerability in Internet Explorer 10 in an exploit which appears to target US military personnel.

Among three high-priority updates in the most recent Patch Tuesday (11 February) was a cumulative fix for Explorer which addressed a whopping two dozen different memory corruption vulnerabilities in the web browser.

However that very same day, net security firm FireEye identified a zero-day IE exploit (CVE-2014-0322) being served up from the US Veterans of Foreign Wars’ website.

Wolfgang Kandek, CTO at clod security firm Qualys, said the attack can be mitigated by either upgrading to IE 11 or using Microsoft’s Experience Mitigation Toolkit (EMET). Earlier version of IE are not affected, he adds.

"The attack is using a Adobe Flash Object to set up the environment for the rest of the exploit," Kandek explained in a blog post. "Currently this 0-day vulnerability only applies to Internet Explorer 10, other versions are not affected.

"(Microsoft's security toolkit) EMET, as (was the case) many times during the IE 0-days of last year, is also successful in preventing the exploit from running successfully, but this time because it actually checks for its presence and aborts if EMET is found."

The breach targets IE 10 users visiting the compromised website through a classic drive-by download attack. The exploit targets IE 10 with Adobe Flash.

Running the latest versions of both versions of software won't help but the exploits aborts exploitation if the user is either browsing with a different version of IE or is using EMET with IE 10. If successful, malicious code will be used to download a encoded payload from a remote server, decode and execute it.
 
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