When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

Winamp has extremely critical vulnerability

Neowin · Aug 27, 2004 03:32 EDT · Hot! with -1 comments

A vulnerability has been reported in Winamp, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user's system.

The problem is caused due to insufficient restrictions on Winamp skin zip files (.wsz). This can e.g. be exploited by a malicious website using a specially crafted Winamp skin to place and execute arbitrary programs. With Internet Explorer this can be done without user interaction.

An XML document in the Winamp skin zip file can reference a HTML document using the "browser" tag and get it to run in the "Local computer zone". This can be exploited to run an executable program embedded in the Winamp skin file using the "object" tag and the "codebase" attribute.

NOTE: The vulnerability is reportedly being exploited in the wild.

The vulnerability has been confirmed on a fully patched system with Winamp 5.04 using Internet Explorer 6.0 on Microsoft Windows XP SP1.

News source: Secunia security