Yahoo Messenger flaw enables spamming through other people's status messages
The unpatched vulnerability in Yahoo Messenger allows attackers to change other people's status messages automatically
Articol publicat de Lucian Constantin în Computerworld
December 2, 2011
IDG News Service - An unpatched Yahoo Messenger vulnerability that allows attackers to change people's status messages and possibly perform other unauthorized actions can be exploited to spam malicious links to a large number of users.
The vulnerability was discovered in the wild by security researchers from antivirus vendor BitDefender while investigating a customer's report about unusual Yahoo Messenger behavior.
The flaw appears to be located in the application's file transfer API (application programming interface) and allows attackers to send malformed requests that result in the execution of commands without any interaction from victims.
"An attacker can write a script in less than 50 lines of code to malform the message sent via the YIM protocol to the victim," said Bogdan Botezatu, an e-threats analysis & communication specialist at BitDefender.
According to the antivirus vendor, Yahoo was notified about the vulnerability through the appropriate channels. However, the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent by IDG.
Until this vulnerability is fixed, users can protect themselves by configuring Yahoo Messenger to ignore anyone who is not in their Messenger list. However, this option will not prevent attacks from their current contacts.
