Risk: Medium
IE is subject to a trio of unpatched vulnerabilities, security firm Secunia has warned. It has identified that two of the three unfixed security bugs are on the "critical" list.
This "deadly duo" could be exploited in tandem to bypass security features in Windows XP SP2 and trick users into downloading malicious files. Flaws in the function used to warn users that they are downloading a potentially executable file and a separate bug that can be used to spoof the file extension in the "Save HTML Document" dialog give attackers the opportunity to disguise malicious executable files as innocuous HTML documents.
The vulnerabilities, published by hacker cyber flash, have been confirmed on a fully patched system with IE 6.0 and Windows XP SP2. Secunia advises IE users to Disable Active Scripting support and the "Hide extension for known file types" option as workarounds in advance of a patch from Microsoft. Secunia describes the flaws as "moderately critical".
A third - less serious - IE bug that could be used to overwrite cookies from trusted sites has also been discovered. The vulnerability has been reported in Internet Explorer 6.0 SP1 on Microsoft Windows XP SP1. But Windows XP SP2 is reportedly immune to the exploit, which in any case only works if a trusted site handles cookies and authentication badly.