"Errant Ampersand" responsible for IE hack
"&" causes trouble
30 July 2009 19:07 GMT / By Duncan Geere
Microsoft has admitted that a tiny coding error in Internet Explorer is responsible for a bug that hackers discovered and began to exploit earlier this month.
Apparently, a single "&" was out of place, meaning that the code of an ActiveX control was corrupted, and malicious coders found a way in through that. Microsoft, in a blog post, said that it was developed using an older library of codes containing flaws.
Earlier this year, in the Pwn2Own hacking contest, Apple's Safari browser was hacked within seconds of the start of the competition, with IE8 and Firefox only taking a few hours.
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