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Living with threats

1st August 2010 Back in 2004, Bill Gates predicted that spam would be a thing of the past within two years. As we all know now, and quite a lot of people predicted at the time, far from being a solved problem, the volume of spam has continued to increase. Read More

Web application security goes from bad to worse in many sectors

27th July 2010 NTA Monitor's 2010 Annual Web Application Security Report analysed the data gathered from web application security tests performed for a wide range of industry sectors over a 12-month period... Read More

IT Managers get to grips with Internet security issues

4th May 2010 According to NTA Monitor's 2010 Annual Security Report, the average number of Internet security vulnerabilities afflicting organisations has fallen.. Read More

Responsible Patching

1st January 2010 Microsoft's response to the "zero day" exploit that was used in the cyber attacks against Google shows that software vendors still have a lot to learn when it comes to responding to vulnerabilities. Read More
Date: 1st August 2009
Risk: Informational

One small typo in Microsoft's code caused the security vulnerability that prompted Microsoft to release an out of sequence patch.

A rogue ampersand created a security hole in a the MSVidCtl ActiveX control that hackers began exploiting in early July. A blog posting on Microsoft's Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) by Michael Howard, a security program manager at Microsoft, explained that the minor typo corrupted the code used by the ActiveX control. This in turn created a buffer-overflow bug.

Microsoft plans to update its fuzzing tools so that they are better at detecting this kind of error. It will also mandate the use of newer ATL code.

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