However, given that level of coding knowledge, creating an exploit would be a simple matter requiring maybe a day or two of effort, Nuwere said.ĭespite the severity of the problems, Core Security received no response from AOL regarding the problems, which it first informed the company of in early March. The vulnerabilities are sophisticated enough that an attacker would need to have experience writing exploits to take advantage of them. While not every ICQ vulnerability discovered by Core Security is that serious, all of those found could be remotely exploited and could, at the least, cause the ICQ client to crash, Nuwere said. In testing, researchers were able to use the vulnerabilities to remotely capture and send out password and mail files from a machine running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT operating system, he said. Attackers could use improperly formatted e-mail messages to deliver the attack, according to Nuwere. The client enables ICQ users to remotely retrieve e-mail messages from their mail server.Ī format string vulnerability and a buffer overflow vulnerability in the client could enable a malicious hacker to remotely attack a machine running ICQ and execute malicious code on the system. The most serious of the vulnerabilities were found in a Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3) mail client that is integrated with the ICQ Pro product.
All of the vulnerabilities were tested on machines running versions of the Windows operating system, but ICQ Pro clients for other platforms are also believed to be vulnerable, Nuwere said.
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