Tavis Ormandy – are you pleased with yourself? Website exploits Microsoft zero-day

Updated Last week I railed against the irresponsible disclosure by a Google engineer of a zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft’s code.

Tavis Ormandy, a security researcher employed by Google, found a vulnerability in Windows XP’s Help and Support Center, but only gave the company five days to fix the problem before going public with details of how hackers could write malicious code to exploit it.

In my opinion publishing exploit code was utterly irresponsible behaviour, and I was worried that having such information floating around the internet would make it easy for cybercriminals to take advantage.

Predictably enough, malicious hackers are now using the zero-day vulnerability according to a blog post by my colleague Donato Ferrante in SophosLabs, as a…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley •   @gcluley

Graham Cluley is a veteran of the anti-virus industry having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent security analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of computer security, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter at @gcluley, on Mastodon at @[email protected], or drop him an email.