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One IE flaw leads to another

Days after one vulnerability is found in Internet Explorer, researchers unearth a new one.

Greg Sandoval Former Staff writer
Greg Sandoval covers media and digital entertainment for CNET News. Based in New York, Sandoval is a former reporter for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. E-mail Greg, or follow him on Twitter at @sandoCNET.
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Greg Sandoval
As researchers pored over a vulnerability found within Microsoft's Internet Explorer less than a week ago, they discovered a totally new IE flaw.

The new bug could be used to launch code execution attacks. Microsoft acknowledged that the vulnerability, found by Andreas Sandblad of Secunia, is not just a successful exploit of the flaw uncovered last week by Michal Zalewski.

It was originally believed that the flaw found by Sandblad was related to the one discovered by Zalewski, but a Microsoft representative confirmed that the two vulnerabilities are separate.

"During analysis, Secunia discovered a variant of this vulnerability," security company Secunia wrote on its Web site on Tuesday, referring to the bug found by Zalewski. The company confirmed the problem "on a fully patched system with Internet Explorer 6.0 and Microsoft Windows XP SP2."

Both flaws could be used to corrupt a PC's memory if the computer's user can be tricked into visiting a malicious Web site, Secunia said.

Secunia added that Microsoft is working on a patch.