Experts have discovered a vulnerability in the Microsoft Baseline Security software that analyses your computer to check the latest securities patches are installed on your system. After MBSA analyzes the system for security vulnerabilities, a report is created as a plain text file that includes sensitive information that can be used by hackers to attack the specific machine. MBSA was created to help users become aware of risks and available patches. However, MBSA turns the simple vulnerability of reading local files into a much more powerful vulnerability. Such a simple vulnerability allows potential hackers to find out about vulnerabilities that enable full control over the machine that is under attack. These are automatic attacks.
This means that active content (executables, scripts, ActiveX, Java, etc.) has the ability to generate a list of vulnerabilities or read a previously created list, and can then utilize these vulnerabilities to its advantage. Even if this report can be accessed only by a specific user, the active content can access it too.
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