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“Aurora” Exploit In Google Attack Now Public
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Computer code that exploits the yet-to-be-patched Internet Explorer vulnerability used in Operation Aurora to attack Google and others in December has now been published on the Internet.
McAfee Labs researchers have seen references to the code on mailing lists and confirmed on Friday that the code was published on at least one Web site. The exploit code is the same code that McAfee Labs had been investigating and shared with Microsoft earlier this week, resulting in a security advisory from Microsoft that was published on Thursday.
The public release of the exploit code increases the possibility of widespread attacks using the Internet Explorer vulnerability. The now public computer code may help cybercriminals craft attacks that use the vulnerability to compromise Windows systems. Popular penetration testing tools are already being updated to include this exploit. This attack is especially deadly on older systems that are running XP and Internet Explorer 6.
As reported on Thursday by McAfee and confirmed by Microsoft, the security vulnerability affects Internet Explorer on all recent versions of Windows. An attacker could gain complete control over a vulnerable system by tricking a user to visit a rigged Web page. New versions of Windows make this exploitation harder, but not impossible.
McAfee Labs has been working around the clock, diving deep into the attack we are calling “Operation Aurora” that hit multiple companies and was publicly disclosed by Google on Tuesday. In our investigation of the attack we discovered that one of the malware samples involved in this broad attack exploits a new, previously unknown vulnerability in Microsoft Internet Explorer.
Many people are taking the matter seriously. The German government, for example, has recommended that its citizens stop using Internet Explorer and use alternative browsers instead.
One of the areas I continue to get questions on is how to stop zero day attacks. One technology is white listing, such as products from our Solidcore family (application control) help to protect against 0-day attacks without signatures and without applying a patch. This is especially important in cases like this, where patches have yet to be released.
McAfee continues to work closely with Microsoft, the government and others to investigate the attacks. Stay tuned to my blog and my Twitter account for more details.
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Tags: Cybercrime, Data Protection, google, Operation Aurora
Comments (15)
Well, for one thing, it seems to be free speech activists/journalists whose gmail accounts were sneaked on… If it is other that the Government, they went to huge lengths to incriminate it…
Why attack originated from China must be done by a Chinese, or Chinese Gov?
As far as I know many sites in China were not sufficiently protected, and servers of those sites can be exploited by any one from any country to mount the attack.
It looks to me that someone seeem eager at jumping to the conclusion that the attacker is a Chinese or Chinese gov
Whitelisting? That\’s not the solution to zero day attacks. McAfee, Norton, AVG, Trend – they\’re all the same. Thank goodness I have BluePoint Security – its cloud based approach prevents zero day attacks from ever happening and no patches are needed! If you want the best tool in antivirus computer safety, you definitely need BluePoint Security.
After reading the attacking mechanism, just realized that users can be protected if they are using <a href=\
found it more ironic that someone in G was using IE so that their internal G desktop/laptop was compromised.
What is \\ ?
It gets added to quotation marks when escaping text to enter it into a database. It is called escaping and it prevents SQL injections.
I guess Mcaffe is doing it the wrong way and that\’s why we see \\ characters added to the text.
\’\'\’ <- you should see three quotation marks.
@Cynic
Not only Google was hacked, over 30 other companies were in the attack. Google is the one taking action by pulling out from China.
Google Chrome and Firefox are pretty good.
Does McAfee meanwhile offer updated signatures to identify and block that JavaScript-based exploit at client endpoints?
Internet Explorer => \
Please comment as to whether McAfee has updated their anti-virus software to protect against this attack.
Does anyone find it ironic that the German Government are recommending the use of Google Chrome instead of IE? And which company presumably using IE 6 was hacked? begins with a G
I wouldn\’t be surprised to hear that Firefox zero-day exploits were involved as well.
I don’t quite undersatnd the threat. It seems to affect only marginal software no serious user is using.
Like, w2hat is this “Internet Explorer” thing?
This all seems very scary, but it may be a marginal problem. Maybe I don\’t understand.
What is this \
Published a video of the same (Aurora exploit in action):
http://praetorianprefect.com/archives/2010/01/the-aurora-ie-exploit-in-action/
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