IE brought to its knees by corrupted JPEGs

[Steve]

A dodgy JPEG could crash Microsoft Internet Explorer, or even allow system exploitation, Michal Zalewski, Polish security expert has discovered in a recent set of experiments. From The Inquirer:

Software crashes were a sign that the Volish programmers had not written code that could take corrupted input into account. Many of the crashes were associated with memory corruption, he said.

If a hacker or hackerette were to use corrupted JPGs, he or she could control memory corruption, he or she could then easily alter the program and take over your computer, Zalewski warned.

Other browsers seemed to handle Zalewski's corrupt JPEG experiments somewhat better, although it's not all doom and gloom for IE, as in past experiments Zalewski found IE was the best at handling iffy HTML mark-up.

[autopilot]

No offense, and i may be completely wrong, but is this not quite old news and was it not fixed in a Windows update a while ago? Or am I thinking of something else?

[Steve]

It looks as though these are recent tests, and I would hope that Michal Zalewski was using an up to date, fully patched system to do the tests.

[directhex]

there have been a number of memory holes in image handling components of all browsers over time. it could well be a new one.

[Twigman]

I would have paid attention, but then:

hackerette

so I he has lsot credibility for such a stupid word...