Microsoft today turned to a new defensive measure to help users ward off ongoing attacks exploiting a known bug in Internet Explorer (IE).
As expected, the company also patched three vulnerabilities in Windows.
"The 'shim' for IE is the news today," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Security. "We had not expected a patch for IE today, but we had not expected the shim either."
Shim is a term used to describe an application compatibility workaround. Storms said it was appropriate to today's temporary fix because Microsoft used the Windows Application Compatibility Toolkit to modify IE so it's immune to attacks that leverage a bug in how the browser processes a CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) file.
"This is the first time that they've used the Application Compatibility Toolkit to mitigate a zero-day vulnerability," said Storms.
The tool, which has been part of Windows since XP's days, was designed to allow older applications, including those created for outdated versions of the OS, to run on newer editions of the operating system.
Microsoft's workaround used the Application Compatibility Toolkit to modify the core library of IE -- a DLL, or Dynamic-Link library, named "Mshtml.dll," that contains the rendering engine -- in memory each time IE runs. The modification prevents recursive loading of a CSS, which effectively stops the existing attacks.
"Microsoft's using the App Comp in an unexpected way," said Storms. "They've incarnated it to help mitigate a zero-day. They're going to use whatever is in their arsenal, that's the bottom line."
Other researchers also applauded the new tactic.
"That was creative," said Wolfgang Kandek, chief technology officer of Qualys, a California-based security risk and compliance management provider. "We like it because it gets the fix out earlier than a true patch."
Qualys today confirmed that after applying the Application Compatibility-based workaround, the current in-the-wild exploit fails to execute.
"One nice thing about the shim is that it doesn't have to be uninstalled prior to installing the patch, whenever that appears," said Storms.
Kandek expects that Microsoft will shut the IE hole on Feb. 8 as part of its usual monthly Patch Tuesday. However, Storms saw the shim's release as a good hint that Microsoft will ship an emergency, or "out-of-band," update for the browser before then.
"I think they have [a patch], but they aren't happy with the QA it's received, so the door is open for an out-of-band if their attack telemetry shows an increase in exploits," Storms said.
Microsoft first acknowledged the CSS bug in IE on Dec. 22, several weeks after French security firm Vupen had issued a bare-bones advisory that said all versions of IE, including 2009's IE8, were vulnerable to attack.
Since then, Microsoft has admitted that it's tracking active attacks exploiting the bug. It repeated that warning today, again saying that it was seeing only "limited attacks attempting to exploit this vulnerability."
That IE vulnerability is just one of several bugs in Microsoft's products that went unpatched today. Last week, the company acknowledged a serious flaw in Windows XP, Vista, Server 2003 and Server 2008, and also confirmed that it had seen reports that Chinese hackers were scouring the Web for information on another IE flaw.
The latter vulnerability had been reported to Microsoft last summer by Google security engineer Michal Zalewski. Microsoft and Zalewski have traded barbs over the timeline of his bug report, and subsequent release of a "fuzzer" tool that found the flaw.
Also last week, Microsoft made another new move by summarizing the bugs that had been reported but had not yet been unpatched.
In a post to the Security Research & Defense blog, Microsoft engineer Jonathan Ness spelled out the outstanding issues.
Storms applauded Ness' table. "That was pretty new for them, and a good move," said Storms. "Because many of these zero-days were reported over the holidays, there was quite a bit of confusion about what was what. It's to their credit that they are saying 'Here's everything that we know,' so we're all on the same page."
Users can download the IE shim from Microsoft's site. A link is included in a Security Research & Defense entry posted today.