Today, Kolsek said that Acros has been digging into a new class of vulnerabilities for months, has found more than 200 flawed applications harboring more than 500 separate bugs, and reported its findings to Microsoft more than four months ago.
"We examined a bunch of applications, more than 220 from about 100 leading software vendors, and found that most every one had the vulnerability," said Kolsek. Acros built a specialized tool to help its researchers pinpoint which applications were vulnerable.
According to Kolsek, the bug is in how most applications load and execute code libraries -- ".dll" files in Windows -- and executables, including ".exe" and ".com" files. He dubbed the class of bugs as "remote binary planting," and said the flaws could be easily exploited.
"The main enabler for this attack is the fact that Windows includes the current working directory in the search order when loading executables," he said. Hackers can use that to trick a wide range of Windows applications into loading malicious files, just as they normally do their own .dll or .exe files.
Most Windows applications rely on the functionality to operate, a problem that may prevent Microsoft from issuing a single patch. Although Microsoft could patch Windows to change the functionality, Kolsek at one point said he believed that such a fix could break scores of applications.
Flawed by design week ? Ovo nece ispraviti prostih 20 linija koda :D