Legal Niches

DRM Gone Bad: Microsoft Windows

By james_fudge

Microsoft has been a strong proponent of digital rights management - especially in its windows operating system - but a recent report on PC World reveals an exploit that uses the very protections the company put in place against users. The exploit involves the msnetobj.dll library, an ActiveX Network Object. The msnetobj.dll library " 'is intended to prevent the owner of a computer from saving or viewing certain files except under limited circumstances, and to prevent the computer's owner from disabling' the library," according to BoingBoing.

Hackers have figured out that the library is useful for attacking computers. Apparently, the file is susceptible to three different attacks - denial of service, buffer overflow, and integer overflow. These attacks can be triggered when the user is lured to a malicious website set up to exploit the file's weakness. Once in, the site can then allow a hacker to run malicious software on the target machine. Read More

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Full post as published by GamePolitics.com on September 28, 2010 (boomark / email).