ID: IRCNE2014032120
Date: 2013-03-01
According to "computerworld", the number of attacks exploiting a yet-to-be-patched vulnerability in Internet Explorer has increased dramatically over the past few days, indicating the exploit is no longer used just in targeted attacks against particular groups of people.
The vulnerability affects Internet Explorer 9 and 10 and was publicly revealed on Feb. 13 by researchers from security firm FireEye who found an exploit for the flaw being served from the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) website.
Microsoft published a security advisory about the vulnerability, which is tracked as CVE-2014-0322, and released a "Fix It" tool as a temporary workaround. However, the company has not yet released a regular patch through the regular Windows update channel.
The attacks reported by FireEye and Websense are known as "watering hole attacks" because they involve compromising websites visited by particular groups of people that attackers wish to target -- in these particular cases U.S. military personnel and French defense contractors.
"We have continued to closely monitor attacks focusing on CVE-2014-0322," security researchers from Symantec said Tuesday in a blog post. "We've observed trends suggesting that attacks targeting this vulnerability are no longer confined to advanced persistent threats (APT) -- the zero-day attacks are expanding to attack average Internet users as well."
According to Symantec's telemetry data, the number of attacks that exploit this vulnerability increased dramatically since Feb. 22 and affected users in many parts of the world, including North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
"If the attack is successful, the exploit drops a banking Trojan that steals login details from certain banks," the Symantec researchers said.
Users should either upgrade to Internet Explorer 11, which is not affected by this vulnerability, or install the Fix It solution provided by Microsoft.
- 3