Thousands of hacked sites, including porn URLs, exploit unpatched IE bug

(Computerworld) Microsoft Corp. warned Saturday of a "huge increase" in attacks exploiting a critical unpatched vulnerability in Internet Explorer (IE) and said some originated from hacked pornography sites.

Other researchers confirmed that attacks were increasingly coming from compromised Web sites.

Microsoft noted the upswing in attacks on its Malware Protection Center blog late Saturday. "The trend for now is going upwards," said researchers Ziv Mador and Tareq Saade on the blog. "We saw a huge increase in the number of reports today compared to yesterday."

Hackers have been exploiting a data binding bug in IE for more than a week, according to researchers who first noted in-the-wild attack code on Chinese servers. The vulnerability, which exists in all versions of the Microsoft browser, including IE5.01, IE6, IE7 and IE8 Beta 2, has so far been exploited only by attack code that targets IE7, the most widely-used edition.


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