[ISN] Accidental Leak Reveals Chinese Hackers Have IE Zero Day

http://www.darkreading.com/vulnerability-management/167901026/security/vulnerabilities/228901665/accidental-leak-reveals-chinese-hackers-have-ie-zero-day.html

By Kelly Jackson Higgins
Darkreading 
Jan 03, 2011

A renowned Google researcher who this week released a new free fuzzer 
that so far has found around 100 vulnerabilities in all browsers says 
Chinese hackers appear to have gotten their hands on one of the same 
bugs he discovered with the tool.

Google's Michal Zalewski unleashed the so-called cross_fuzz tool on New 
Year's Day and announced the fuzzer to date uncovered more than 100 
vulnerabilities, many of them exploitable, in all browsers.

In a bizarre twist, Zalewski says an accidental leak of the address of 
the fuzzer prior to its release helped reveal some unexpected 
intelligence, namely that "third parties in China" apparently also know 
about an unpatched and exploitable bug he found in IE with the fuzzer. 
It all started when one of cross_fuzz's developers, who was working on 
crashes in the open-source WebKit browser engine used in Chrome and 
Safari, inadvertently leaked the address of the fuzzer in one of the 
crash traces that was uploaded. That made the fuzzer's directory, as 
well as the IE test results from the fuzzer indexed by GoogleBot, he 
says.

Zalewski says he was able to confirm afterward that there were no 
downloads or discoveries of the tool. But on Dec. 30, he says, an IP 
address in China queried keywords included in one of the indexed 
cross_fuzz files, specifically two DLL functions, BreakAASpecial and 
BreakCircularMemoryReferences, associated with and unique to the 
zero-day IE flaw he found with the fuzzer.

[...]


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