Microsoft closes critical holes in Windows Media Player and Media Center

As previously announced, Microsoft has released three updates to close four holes. MS11-015 fixes two bugs in its Windows Media Player and Media Center software. Attackers can exploit a bug in the code for processing DVR-MS files (Microsoft Digital Video Recording) to inject and execute arbitrary code. Microsoft says that visiting a specially crafted web page is all that's required to become a victim. The company considers it likely that functioning exploits will appear.

The second hole in the Media Player and Media Center is a further instance of the problem known as DLL hijacking or binary planting that has been around for several months. If a developer hasn't explicitly stated the path of a DLL, Windows successively searches various folders to find it. In the worst case, the program will retrieve the DLL from a network volume that has been compromised by an attacker.

The remaining two updates for the Remote Desktop Client (RDP) and the Office Groove collaboration software also deal with the same problem. For several months, Microsoft has been patching applications to gradually tackle this DLL problem.

Microsoft has provided an overview of all the bulletins that have now been released: Microsoft Security Bulletin Summary for March 2011.

In addition to the security updates, Microsoft has also released another update (KB2505438) designed to resolve stability issues in the 64-bit version of Windows 7.

(crve)