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ronjor
August 9th, 2004, 09:06 AM
Description:
Ryan McGeehan has reported a vulnerability in AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), which potentially can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user's system.

The vulnerability is caused due to a boundary error within the handling of "Away" messages and can be exploited to cause a stack-based buffer overflow by supplying an overly long "Away" message (about 1024 bytes). A malicious website can exploit this via the "aim:" URI handler by passing an overly long argument to the "goaway?message" parameter.

Successful exploitation may allow execution of arbitrary code on a user's system when e.g. a malicious website is visited with certain browsers.

The vulnerability has been confirmed in version 5.5.3595. Other versions may also be affected.

http://secunia.com/advisories/12198/

dog
August 11th, 2004, 05:01 AM
AIM Beta Fixes Security Hole
August 10, 2004
By Matt Hicks

America Online Inc. has released a beta version of AOL Instant Messenger that fixes a critical security hole that could open users to remote attack.

As previously reported, AOL had promised to fix the vulnerability in an upgraded version of AIM. On Tuesday, it made a test version of AIM 5.9 Available for Download for AIM (http://www.aim.com/get_aim/win/win_beta.adp) (AOL Instant Messenger)

Eweek Article (http://www.eweek.com/print_article/0,1761,a=133257,00.asp)