

Microsoft has published a warning to Internet Explorer users about an unpatched zero-day vulnerability in the browser that is being exploited in targeted attacks.

The security hole, which has been dubbed CVE-2020-0674 and is believed to be related to a critical security vulnerability in Firefox that Mozilla warned about earlier this month, could be exploited to allow an attacker to execute malicious code on a user’s computer:

“The vulnerability could corrupt memory in such a way that an attacker could execute arbitrary code in the context of the current user. An attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the current user. If the current user is logged on with administrative user rights, an attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could take control of an affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights.”

One way in which the vulnerability could be exploited is via a web-based attack, where users could be lured into visiting a boobytrapped webpage – perhaps via a malicious link in an email.

Microsoft goes on to describe that all supported versions of Windows are vulnerable to exploitation.

Which is bad news, because right now the company doesn’t have a security patch for the vulnerability, although in its advisory Microsoft does offer workarounds and mitigations to reduce the threat.

Internet Explorer is still installed on users’ PCs despite being replaced by Edge as the default browser in the most recent versions of Windows.

Microsoft says it is working on a fix.

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