[karajorma]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/26/winamp_brown_alert/

Be careful with those new skins I guess. This one's in the wild.

[Blue Lion]

I still use Winamp 2

[Kamikaze]

The danger of the exploit is that you can be exploited by clicking a link that's to a .jpg or something like that. The trick is done by using a php script that's camouflaged as a .jpg or something, you click and it leads you to a xml winamp skin file that can run code.

So the only way to prevent this is to keep your browsers from automatically opening winamp skins and don't click on suspicious links.

[ionia23]

It amazes me.  All this **** because some dickhead wants to sell me Viagra.

Spamming and all it's variants should be an unappealable capital offense.

[karajorma]

I read a story once about how anti-spam people managed to get hold of a spammers home address.

What they did is sign him up for every piece of junk snail mail they could. Apparently this guy recieved kilograms of junk snail mail a day.

I just laughed myself silly at the sheer poetic justice

[ionia23]

Originally posted by karajorma
I read a story once about how anti-spam people managed to get hold of a spammers home address.

What they did is sign him up for every piece of junk snail mail they could. Apparently this guy recieved kilograms of junk snail mail a day.

I just laughed myself silly at the sheer poetic justice

I did something like that to a spammer out of Canada once who was selling bulk-email services (spam for spammers).  Call the "Staffed 24 hours a day" customer service number and filled up his voice mail.  The message changed when it was full giving me his real name.


Didn't take long to get his home address. and social security number, and criminal record.

Amazing what you can find out about a person.  Didn't do anything, just posted his home number in bestiality classified ads with a request to call between 1 and 5 a.m.

And sent the Mormons to his house a lot.

if i were truly creative, and willing to do the homework, turning off his utilities would have been a laugh riot.  Of course, his number is disconnected now .

[demon442]

Security firm Secunia describes the flaw as "extremely critical". Pending the availability of a fix, Secunia advises WinAmp users to use an alternative product

Notice how Secunia made an extra effort not to advise people to use another browser.

[Flipside]

'The problem is caused due to insufficient restrictions on Winamp skin zip files (.wsz). This can e.g. be exploited by a malicious website using a specially crafted Winamp skin to place and execute arbitrary programs. With Internet Explorer this can be done without user interaction.'

True, but they drop the big hint

[Kamikaze]

It's possible to exploit this with other browsers anyway. If you have wsz files associated with automatic winamp opening on Mozilla, it'll work just the same.

Another cause of the problem is people's tendency to run on admin accounts, so an exploit like this can kill everything. That's a Windows + various other programs design flaw.

[demon442]

Originally posted by Kamikaze
Another cause of the problem is people's tendency to run on admin accounts, so an exploit like this can kill everything. That's a Windows + various other programs design flaw.

True, but the only way around that would be to terminalize Windows, thus destroying any flexability gained with a PC.  And with the rise of .Net, the day that we all log on to our Windows account from a broadband monitor is getting closer.