Researcher roots out critical bugs in Yahoo's music player

The researcher who last week revealed vulnerabilities in the photo uploader used by Facebook and MySpace Monday said that multiple flaws in Yahoo's music player program can be used to attack Windows PCs running Internet Explorer.

Elazar Broad, who last Thursday posted proof-of-exploit code for vulnerabilities in ActiveX controls used by Facebook and MySpace, outlined a new bug in Yahoo Music Jukebox today and provided attack code for that flaw and another disclosed earlier by a different researcher.

The two ActiveX controls that can put systems at risk -- "datagrid.dll" and "mediagrid.dll" -- are both prone to buffer-overflow attacks because they fail to account for malicious input. Broad posted proof-of-concepts for both bugs on the milw0rm.com Web site.

He credited another researcher, Krystian Kloskowski, with uncovering the datagrid.dll ActiveX vulnerability.

"Successful exploitation allows execution of arbitrary code when a user visits a malicious Web site," said Danish vulnerability tracker Secunia ASA, which collectively ranked the two bugs "Extremely critical," the highest-possible rating in its five-step system.

Symantec confirmed the vulnerabilities and the efficacy of Broad's attack code and also said that it is likely that in-the-wild exploits will appear. "We are not currently aware of any public exploitation of these vulnerabilities, [however] judging by the wide distribution of these controls, we assume that these issues will be used by attackers," the company said in a warning to customers of its DeepSight threat management service.

The Yahoo Music Jukebox is the default player software for the portal's music offerings, including its pay-per-track catalog and the flat-fee Yahoo Music Unlimited subscription service. Coincidentally, Yahoo announced today that it plans to scrap Music Unlimited and transfer its subscriptions to RealNetworks Inc.'s Rhapsody music service.

Yahoo did not respond to questions about when and how the ActiveX controls would be patched.

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