The SANS Institute's free "kill bit" tool provides checkbox-simple settings to disable half a dozen ActiveX controls. It's much easier than monkeying with the Windows registry.
"This is an easy way to disable the ActiveX control [for people] who don't know how to modify the keys directly," said Friedrichs.
As if to emphasize the seriousness of the ActiveX problem, Friedrich's team warned customers Monday that attack code targeting one of the two Yahoo Music Jukebox bugs was on the loose. "Just one day after the proof of concept was released, in-the-wild exploitation was identified in our crawler honeypots," Patrick Jungles, a Symantec analyst, said in an alert to customers of the company's DeepSight threat network.
Browser plug-in problems are anything but rare, said Friedrichs. "In the first half of 2007, Symantec counted 237 plug-in vulnerabilities. That's compared to 108 in all of 2006." The vast majority of those bugs -- 89 percent, in fact -- were in ActiveX controls, making IE by far the most popular target for plug-in exploits.
Last week, Facebook and MySpace said that they had come up with fixes for the vulnerabilities Broad had initially spotted, saying through a spokeswoman that they were "working to individually alert users of any additional steps that need to be taken to ensure user security." The two companies did not immediately respond to queries Tuesday about the newest bugs, however.
As of mid-day Tuesday, Yahoo had not yet replied to questions posed the day before concerning the Yahoo Music Jukebox flaws.
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