The Red Brick Times

AVG has shown "Exploit" as a threat in my computer both yesterday and today. An Exploit is a "piece of software, a chunk of data, or sequence of commands that take advantage of a bug, glitch or vulnerability in order to cause unintended or unanticipated behavior to occur on computer software, hardware, or something electronic (usually computerized). This frequently includes such things as gaining control of a computer system or allowing privilege escalation or a denial of service attack." (quote from Wikipedia).

It is possible that the exploit threat came in via a JPEG image. Not only Windows XP and Server 2003, but other applications are vulnerable because of how they process a .jpg file. An article at Techweb dated September 23 indicates that hackers have worked this vulnerability to allow introduction of executable code via a .jpg file.

Microsoft has published a patch for the JPEG vulnerability. See How to update your computer with the JPEG processing (GDI+) security update at the Microsoft website.
Posted 8:27 AM by Andy (2) comments

       Comments:

Not only was AVG auto-updating and auto-scanning to catch the bug, but I was running Firefox in Sandboxie. The affected files plucked out by AVG were both in the Sandbox subfolder of the Documents and Settings path. When you close the Sandbox, the enclosed files are wiped. As a third level of watchfulness, Zone Alarm will pop-up a window if an unexpected and unrecognized process or program tries to access the Internet. That means, of course, that the malware is active in your computer, but it certainly alerts one to illicit activity.

# posted by  Andy : September 28, 2007 9:34 AM
 
FYI: The free version of ZoneAlarm is generally regarded as practically worthless today compared to some other options now available (the paid version is still very good). After reading a bunch of sites testing various (free) firewalls I switched to Comodo some time ago.

# posted by  whatley : September 28, 2007 10:08 AM
 
Post a Comment


---