"Microsoft was initially given a May 12, 2015 deadline, but this deadline was extended to July 19 at the vendor’s request. Since the company failed to meet this deadline, ZDI has decided to inform users of the existence of this flaw."<p>I would expect Microsoft to handle security vulnerabilities with a higher priority. Not sure why they are dropping this on the floor.
I'm not a 'security researcher', and have only a technical layman's grasp of the issue, but:<p>> "By manipulating a document's elements an attacker can force a dangling pointer to be reused after it has been freed. An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to execute code under the context of the current process,”<p>The first and second sentence there feels like an 'and then a miracle happens' argument (<a href="http://star.psy.ohio-state.edu/coglab/Miracle.html" rel="nofollow">http://star.psy.ohio-state.edu/coglab/Miracle.html</a>). I get that, in some cases dangling pointers might allow you to get a bit of uploaded data to be treated like a bit of internal data. But it seems to me like a piece of extraordinary unlikely bad luck to allow this to execute arbitrary code.<p>So I don't dismiss that there is a theoretical risk, but can anyone suggest how much risk is in these risks. In particular, is the risk of such an exploit greater than the risk of an exploiter finding a new weakness? If not, then I can understand why there is no great urgency to patch these flaws.
WTF? Microsoft must have known what would happen. This isn't 1999 anymore. Did they just call HP's bluff? I was under the impression that MS was generally doing a fairly good job as far as taking these reports seriously.
How embarassing. I think it's hubris at this point that keeps Internet Explorer alive. I think it's been obvious for years that Microsoft just doesn't have the engineering talent to make a decent browser. It's time they bow out of that particular arena and focus on areas where they are strong.