IE Zero-Day Exploit Disappears On Reboot

nk497 writes "Criminals are taking advantage of unpatched holes in Internet Explorer to launch 'diskless' attacks on PCs visiting malicious sites. Security company FireEye uncovered the zero-day flaw on at least one breached U.S. site, describing the exploit as a 'classic drive-by download attack'. But FireEye also noted the malware doesn't write to disk and disappears on reboot — provided it hasn't already taken over your PC — making it trickier to detect, though easier to purge. '[This is] a technique not typically used by advanced persistent threat (APT) actors,' the company said. 'This technique will further complicate network defenders' ability to triage compromised systems, using traditional forensics methods.'"

Re:Yay!

[Jeff Flanagan]

XP is very much inferior to Windows 7 or 8. A single process can stall out every application on an XP machine. Under Windows 7 or 8, and probably even Vista, the same process is forced to share the CPU so the machine is still usable.