Recent
Articles |
Microsoft Releases WMF Patch Early
Rather than wait through the weekend until Patch Tuesday, Microsoft made a patch
for the critical flaw available today. Windows machines began responding to a
message from...
Anti-Phishing Tool For IE7, Wait, IE6 Instead
Users of IE6 under Microsoft Windows XP SP2 will soon have a new security feature
available for the MSN Toolbar. The MSN Toolbar has some useful features, like
tabbed browsing. InfoWorld now notes in a report...
Data
Backups - One Key to Business Survival
Your customer data is a precious resource that can literally be worth its weight
in gold! If used properly, it can be repeatedly mined for additional sales...
|
|
|
01.10.06
Performance
Issues For WMF
 By John Stith
Microsoft recently faced a tough challenge, dealing with the "zero-day" exploit.
This past week they released a fix early instead of on the standard patch Tuesday
in order to alleviate the fears of users around the world. Over the weekend, another
problem with the WMF turned up.
According to the Microsoft Security Center Blog, the problem isn't necessarily
exploitable; it's a performance problem. Apparently, a new, specially crafted
WMF image can cause the Windows Graphic Rendering Engine to crash. It just causes
some apps to unexpectedly crash.
They pointed out they had previously identified these issues as part of their
code maintenance:
Lennart Wistrand here. I wanted to write a few lines about the public post made
over the weekend about a new specially crafted WMF image that could potentially
cause the application using the Windows Graphics Rendering Engine to crash. As
it turns out, these crashes are not exploitable but are instead Windows performance
issues that could cause some WMF applications to unexpectedly exit.
These issues do not allow an attacker to run code or crash the operating system.
They may cause the WMF application to crash, in which case the user may restart
the application and resume activity. We had previously identified these issues
as part of our ongoing code maintenance and are evaluating them for inclusion
in the next service pack for the affected products.
Window's January patch release should hit today. It was originally to cover the
WMF exploit, but Microsoft sent that one out early. The one today still includes
two critical updates. It's recommended people pick up these important updates
and resume the regularly scheduled updates.
About the Author:
John Stith is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.
|
