Internet Explorer 8 Critical Zero-Day Security Vulnerability Released in the Wild

It is just a little over two months since the first public testing milestone for Internet Explorer was made available outside of Redmond, and a critical 0-day security vulnerability impacting the browser has already been released in the wild. Security researcher Aviv Raff has tucked away an exploit somewhere on his blog and issued an invitation for visitors for a little game of vulnerability treasure hunt. According to Raff, both Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 are susceptible to attacks. The researcher stated that he was releasing the vulnerability as part of the celebration of Israel's 60 years of independence.

"As part of the celebration, I'm releasing a new 0day vulnerability. (...) In the spirit of this day, I've decided not to release full details about this vulnerability yet, but rather play a little 'treasure hunt' game. Somewhere in my blog, I embedded a proof-of-concept code which exploits this 0day vulnerability," Raff stated.

Microsoft failed to issue an official comment on the IE7 and IE8 Beta 1 vulnerability game, but it seems that so far, none of the visitors to the security researcher's website managed to come across the exploit code. This even if they were supplied with a number of clues to help them identify the attack, including: "IE7.0 and IE8.0b users will get pwned. An interaction with the sploit is needed. There's no need to find the post. It's everywhere. 404 is the way to go. Acidus was right! 'Local resources' is the key."

However, Raff is willing to take it a step further. On may 14, 2008, he plans to make public all the details related to the vulnerability. "Next Wednesday I will release the full technical details of this 0day vulnerability and the proof-of-concept code," Raff promised. Of course that the published proof-of-concept will enable all potential attackers to build exploits using the zero day vulnerability and target Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 users.