The third-party "open source" patch for Internet Explorer that we told you about earlier today, contains more than a few potentially nasty surprises. As we noted, German tech site Heise had already warned of dangerous buffer overflows. Openwares.org, a month-old site which boasts "Software is free" today published source code and a binary executable purporting to fix a loophole in Internet Explorer for Windows. It"s unusual, but not unprecedented, for third parties to issue their own fixes for Microsoft"s exploit-riddled browser. But Heise advises that this patch could be more trouble than it"s worth, and the fix has already been taken in for some maintenance.
"This patch addresses a vulnerability in Microsoft Internet Explorer that could allow Hackers and con-artists to to display a fake URL in the address and status bars. The vulnerability is caused due to an input validation error, which can be exploited by including the "%01" and "%00" URL encoded representations after the username and right before the "@" character in an URL," according to a release note accompanying the patch. Unfortunately, the authors of the patch also enabled a Windows Registry key used by spyware. IEmsg.dll. "When we"re absulotly [sic] sure that the code is bulletproof we"ll re-release it," says Openwares"s forum administrator.