[LINK] Messenger exploit

[rchirgwin at ozemail.com.au]

http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid14_gci1053012,00.html

Yet another ... This time, you can remotely crash MS Messenger.

The process is (roughly and as I gather!) this; the image you use to 
represent yourself in the remote chat session can be crafted so that 
it's too large for the image memory space.

This causes a buffer overflow at the receiving chat machine, allowing 
the execution of arbitrary code.

As the article mentions, the exploit is supposed to have been fixed in 
last Tuesday's patches (which, by the way, have slowed my home box to a 
stupidly slow crawl on just about any program launch).

The exploit would traverse firewalls, if the firewalls are configured to 
pass MS Messenger traffic, because the image passes as ordinary traffic 
(of course, if you block Messenger, you're instantly besieged by users 
complaining that they have to replace gossip with productive work, but 
that's another matter...).

RC