A zero-day (unpatched) vulnerability in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is being exploited in the wild, the company warned in an advisory issued today.
On the same day it issued software fixes as part of its Patch Tuesday schedule, Microsoft released a pre-patch advisory to warn of the risk of remote code execution attacks against users of IE 6 and IE 7.
From the advisory:
Our investigation so far has shown that Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer 5.01 Service Pack 4 on Microsoft Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 are not affected, and that Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1 on Microsoft Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, and Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 are vulnerable.
The vulnerability exists due to an invalid pointer reference being used within Internet Explorer. It is possible under certain conditions for the invalid pointer to be accessed after an object is deleted. In a specially-crafted attack, in attempting to access a freed object, Internet Explorer can be caused to allow remote code execution.
Microsoft said it was aware of targeted attacks attempting to use this vulnerability. No other details on the attacks were offered.
The company made it clear that the newest version of the browser – Internet Explorer 8 — was not affected by this vulnerability.
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