Myspace Photo Uploader ActiveX Removal

As many of you know, ActiveX controls are all over the place. Some of them are designed in a secure manner and some are not.

During the first month of this year (Jan 2008), Myspace was informed that their photo uploader ActiveX control (MySpaceUploader.ocx 1.0.0.4 & 1.0.0.5) was not so secure....they were not informed with a note or an e-mail...they were informed with the release of a public exploit.

The exploit allowed for execution of arbitrary code in the victim's browser....game over. You didn't have to do much to get owned...just have the ActiveX installed and visit a [malicious]website, that's it.

Myspace investigated the problem and issued a fixed Active X control (MySpaceUploader.ocx 1.0.0.6). Great!

But what if it happens again? What if there are still problems in the control? How do you remove it from your Internet Explorer?

The following steps can be used to remove almost any ActiveX control from IE, but I will use the Myspace control as my example....here are the steps (in IE 7.0).

1) Open IE. Go to "Tools" -> "Manage Add-ons" -> "Enable or Disable Add-ons"


2) In the drop-down menu, select "Downloaded ActiveX Controls (32-bit)"

3) You will be presented a list of installed ActiveX controls. At this point, you can simply disable the control or totally delete the control. Lets just delete the control by highlighting it and hitting the "Delete" button.


4) But if we delete the control, how can we upload photos to Myspace? Well, lucky enough for us, Myspace has maintained its older form based upload function....you just have to look for it.

5) Finally, download Firefox 3 and stop using Internet Explorer to surf social networking sites =)

And that is how you delete that silly (and perhaps insecure) Myspace ActiveX control. You don't need that silly thing anyways.