Yahoo Messenger Flaw Enables Spamming Through Other People’s Status Messages - hookcounces

An unpatched Yahoo Messenger exposure that allows attackers to modification people's position messages and possibly perform other unauthorized actions hind end be exploited to Spam malicious golf links to a large number of users.

The vulnerability was discovered in the wild by security researchers from antivirus vendor BitDefender while investigating a customer's news report nearly unusual Yahoo Messenger behavior.

The flaw appears to be placed in the application's single file transfer API (application programming user interface) and allows attackers to institutionalise unshapely requests that result in the execution of commands without any interaction from victims.

"An attacker nates write a hand in to a lesser degree 50 lines of code to malform the content sent via the YIM protocol to the dupe," same Bogdan Botezatu, an e-threats analysis & communication specialist at BitDefender.

"Status changing appears to be only one of the things the attacker can abuse. We're currently investigating what other things they may achieve," he added.

Victims are unconvincing to recognise that their status messages have changed and if they usance version 11.5 of Yokel Messenger, which supports tabbed conversations, they power not even spot the rogue requests, Botezatu said.

This vulnerability can be leveraged by attackers to earn money direct affiliate merchandising schemes by impulsive traffic to certain websites Beaver State to spam beady-eyed golf links that point to drive-by download pages.

Drive-away download attacks overwork unpatched vulnerabilities in browser plug-INS same Java, Tatty Histrion, or Adobe Reader, and are currently one of the primary election methods of distributing malware.

Links included in position messages ordinarily have a high get through-through rate because they are addressed to the victim's friends. This way that URLs spammed in this way leave exist clicked aside most of their contacts, the BitDefender researchers said.

According to the antivirus vendor, Yahoo was notified about the vulnerability direct the appropriate channels. Nonetheless, the company did non immediately answer to a request for notice sent past IDG.

Until this exposure is fast, users can protect themselves by configuring Yahoo Messenger to cut anyone who is not in their Courier list. However, this option will not forbid attacks from their current contacts.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/472520/yahoo_messenger_flaw_enables_spamming_through_other_peoples_status_messages.html

Posted by: hookcounces.blogspot.com

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