Microsoft Visual Studio Flaws Reach News Headlines

The best hackers in the world are able to find the smallest and most hidden vulnerabilities. They are then able to take complete advantage of these vulnerabilities and do whatever they please. Sadly, Hackers are not the only type of people trying to get into systems and exploit vulnerabilities. There are many different types of online criminals and malicious online attackers out there. We all just have to hold thumbs, fingers and toes that our personal machines will not be next. If you don't want your machine to be next, listen up because I am here to tell you about the latest vulnerabilities which have been confirmed in Microsoft Visual Studio.

If the vulnerabilities are exploited by malicious online attackers they could bypass security features, giving them access to all your personal information. With this personal information the possibilities of what the online attacker could do with it are endless. The online attacker may also be able to compromise applications which have been built by making use of the Active Template Library.

Table 1. The software these vulnerabilities affect

These vulnerabilities have been rated as moderately critical and although they have been rated as moderately critical their impact is quite haunting. This includes the accessing and manipulation of systems without the consent of the user. As you should all know Microsoft Visual Studio is a fantastic integrated development environment. Some of the files of Microsoft Visual Studio include: AAFOBJ.DLL,  accountmgr.dll, actlogger.dll, anagrams.exe as well as ARROW.VB.

The vulnerabilities in Microsoft Visual Studio include the following:

1. There is an error in the ATL headers when handling certain streams. This may be exploited in order to cause memory corruption from a web page when passing a manipulated stream to a control which is vulnerable.
2. There is also a problem with regard to the ATL headers, when the handling of object instantiation from data streams take place. This may allow the bypassing of many security features which could have disastrous consequences.
3. There is also a huge problem within the ATL which may result in a certain string being read. This would happen without the termination of null bytes, which may be exploited in order to disclose memory content which goes way beyond the end of the string.

I am sure you are all wondering what the answer is to not becoming a victim of all these likely occurrences. These Microsoft Visual Studio problems are seriously taking their toll on us and it is every users responsibility to not become a victim. Microsoft Visual Studio has done their part in order to help, now it is your turn to do yours. All that is really required is for all users to apply the relevant patches as soon as is humanly possible. I would like to leave you with a quote in conclusion:"Any type of operating system that I wanted to be able to hack, I basically compromised the source code, copied it over to the university because I didn't have enough space on my 200 megabyte hard drive."-Kevin Mitnick