Microsoft issues security advisory on IE vulnerability

From InfoWorld: Microsoft Monday night issued a security advisory that provides customers with guidance and workarounds for dealing with a zero-day exploit aimed at Internet Explorer.

Earlier in the day, the company said it was investigating the incident which emerged over the weekend when someone published the exploit code to the Bugtraq mailing list. By Monday night, Microsoft switched gears and issued the advisory. There have not been any active exploits of the vulnerability reported so far.

Microsoft released Security Advisory 977981, which includes workarounds for an issue that exposes a flaw in Cascading Style Sheets that could allow for remote code execution. Vulnerabilities that allow remote-code execution generally result in patches rated as critical by Microsoft.

The advisory confirmed the vulnerability affects IE 6 on Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, and IE 6 and IE 7 on supported editions of XP, Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008. Microsoft’s said users running IE 7 on Vista can configure the browser to run in Protected Mode to limit the impact of the vulnerability. It also recommended setting the Internet zone security setting to “High” to protect against the exploit. The “High” setting will disable JavaScript, which currently is the only confirmed attack mode.

Microsoft said IE 5.01 Service Pack 4 and IE 8 on all supported versions of Windows are not affected.

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