01.25.10
Internet Explorer Still Not Secure, Still Standards-hostile, and Still Giving the NHS a Headache
Yorkshire air ambulance (NHS)
Summary: Internet Explorer mayday is still here, SVG is still not supported, and British taxpayers pay the price (or pay with their lives)
GOOGLE has issued a challenge to China, removing some censorship in the process (and getting some praise or flak for it). Totalitarians’ sympathiser, Microsoft, says it will carry on censoring results for the suppressive regime, which it later denies because it does not want the public to know (bad for PR). We wrote about this before and provided extensive evidence.
Using a new product, Microsoft helps manipulate search engines like Google and it is curious because Google’s China attacks were caused by Internet Explorer [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10] (and more specifically, Microsoft’s negligence [1, 2, 3]). Internet Explorer is still not secure. From the news:
- Researchers up ante, create exploits for IE7, IE8
- Weaknesses and Vulnerabilities Discovered by Experts in Microsoft’s IE
A renowned security research company has revealed that it has managed to discover yet another set to vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s web browser, a mere day after the company patched the browser after a high-profile and highly-publicized attack on Google in China.
There was also a vulnerability disclosed a day after Microsoft had released patches. How about the vulnerability that’s 17 years old? Among the news coverage we have:
- Microsoft investigates 17-year-old Windows flaw
- Microsoft warns of flaw in 32-bit Windows kernel
- Microsoft confirms 17-year-old Windows vulnerability
- Microsoft confirms low-risk zero-day in Windows kernel
- Microsoft: Identifies 17-Year-Old Bug in Windows – It’s about time
- 17-year-old Microsoft flaw affects Windows 7
- Microsoft Warns About 17-Year-Old Windows Bug
- Microsoft investigating ZeroDay impacting Windows NT Kernel
On the heels of Microsoft announcing an out-of-cycle patch for the ZeroDay vulnerability in Internet Explorer, researcher Travis Ormandy has released details on another ZeroDay that exists in the Windows NT Kernel on every system version from Windows NT 3.1 to Windows 7.
This is confirmed by Microsoft itself by the way.
The NHS, which is a Windows shop for the most part [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], should already abandon Windows or at least abandon Internet Explorer.
Why the NHS can’t get its browser act together
[...]
Don’t worry, said Microsoft a few days ago: the zero-day vulnerability that Chinese hackers exploited to infiltrate Google’s network only affects Internet Explorer 6 (released in 2000) running on Windows XP (released in 2001).
The implication being that nobody uses that still, do they? Ed Bott, who has forgotten more about Microsoft than many people know, says in a vehement blogpost at ZDNet that:
“Any IT professional who is still allowing IE6 to be used in a corporate setting is guilty of malpractice. Think that judgment is too harsh? Ask the security experts at Google, Adobe, and dozens of other large corporations that are cleaning up the mess from a wave of targeted attacks that allowed source code and confidential data to fall into the hands of well-organized intruders. The entry point? According to Microsoft, it’s IE6.”
Ed Bott is a Microsoft-bribed mouthpiece, so it hardly matters what he says about Microsoft products. He lied about rivals of Internet Explorer a few days ago (by repeating the Microsoft talking points). He is almost ZDNet’s way of advertising Microsoft under the more trustworthy guise of “blogs”.
As an aside, Internet Explorer still does not support SVG, which has been around for ages. There is no reason to believe that this will change, according to this new analysis which says:
As usual, Microsoft’s action drew considerable scrutiny and even skepticism. It’s not hard to find commenters who write about “false marriage”, “damage” and lock-out. The major market reality that has impacted SVG for years is that all major Web browsers support it–except for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Numerous projects have decided against SVG in their designs precisely because of this lack.
Initial reaction to Microsoft’s decision has been, in my paraphrase: “Finally! Soon IE will support SVG, and we can get back to our programming.” I’m unconvinced — but also unsure that it matters.
There’s no guarantee that Microsoft will ever upgrade IE again, let alone that it’ll include SVG. Even if it does, it’ll be many years before use of earlier versions (IE 5, 6, 7, and 8, for example) falls below whatever threshold decision-makers decide should apply.
We wrote about this in:
- Microsoft Might Embrace and Extend SVG
- “On the SVG List, a Couple of People [Are] Leery of Microsoft.”
Internet Explorer should just be removed from the Internet. It was only put on the Internet in order to sell Windows, Office and along with them substitutes to standards like SVG, so it’s not just simply a Web browser. █
“In one piece of mail people were suggesting that Office had to work equally well with all browsers and that we shouldn’t force Office users to use our browser. This Is wrong and I wanted to correct this.
“Another suggestion In this mail was that we can’t make our own unilateral extensions to HTML I was going to say this was wrong and correct this also.”
–Bill Gates [PDF]
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Yuhong Bao said,
February 2, 2010 at 9:23 pm
“How about the vulnerability that’s 17 years old? ”
AFRIK that is because it is a bug in the NT kernel support for V86 mode used by NTVDM to run DOS apps.