From: Alexander Sotirov (asotirovdetermina.com)
Date: Mon Apr 02 2007 - 21:13:45 CDT

• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]

George Ou wrote:
> The exploited instance of IE7 probably spawns cmd.exe with the same
> privilege levels as IE7 in Protected Mode, which means you don't have
> read/write access to the user or system files. It's still bad because you
> probably get to harvest all of the saved username/passwords in the browser
> and capture all input/output from that IE session.
>
> Now in the case of an exploited Firefox 2, you have full read/write
> permissions to all of the user files which means you get to steal all the
> user files and/or encrypt them for ransom.

Protected Mode only blocks write access. IE can write only to a few locations on
the system, but it still has full read access to all files readable by the user.

See http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/IETechCol/dnwebgen/ProtectedMode.asp
and slides 41-53 in
http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/1/3/01381C25-72DA-4AA9-B792-43E02A243C71/SEC403_Riley.ppt

Alex

_______________________________________________
Full-Disclosure - We believe in it.
Charter: http://lists.grok.org.uk/full-disclosure-charter.html
Hosted and sponsored by Secunia - http://secunia.com/

• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]