Internet Explorer Vulnerabilities Gone Wild

It's a busy time for Internet Explorer: Patch Tuesday addressed quite a few issues in IE, and an additional advisory for a 0-day vulnerability which has been exploited in the wild, also in Internet Explorer, soon followed.

Naturally, when IE is having a busy time- so are we.

An out-of-band Security Update has been released for Trustwave's Secure Web Gateway product with detection aimed specifically at the 0-day vulnerability in MSXML, known as CVE-2012-1889. Customers of the SWG product are advised to install this update in order to ensure maximal protection against this vulnerability. Customers may examine the "Installed Updates" tab in the "Updates Management" section of the SWG GUI in order to verify that "M86 Security Update 131" is installed. This update is available for all supported versions of SWG.

In addition to the 0-day vulnerability, an exploit for CVE-2012-1875, a vulnerability included as part of June's Security Bulletin has been spotted in the wild. Earlier last week we noticed a malicious page blocked by the SWG product; further examination of the malicious code reveals that it indeed exploits CVE-2012-1875. As in several previous cases, it seems that malware authors have been using pastebin to collaborate on their work and what seems like an earlier, less clean version of the exploit we observed can be found on pastebin:




Unfortunately, though they seem to be collaborating, whoever wrote the exploit didn't seem to get a code review from anyone (or not a very good one, anyway...), as the exploit itself doesn't work. We did manage to dig out the URL of the executable they were presumably attempting to download and execute, but the domain is now down and so we don't have the file itself.

SWG customers are already protected against the CVE-2012-1875 exploit by our proactive engines and no further action is required.

As always, we will continue to monitor the situation to ensure the best protection for our customers.