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Text bug blights Trillian

Rather Dented

By John Leyden • Get more from this author

Posted in Software & Security, 19th June 2007 11:09 GMT

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Users of the popular Trillian instant messaging client need to update their software following the discovery of a serious security bug.

The multi-protocol chat application from Cerulean Studios is subject to a heap overflow vulnerability because of programming errors involving the word-wrapping of UTF-8 text.

As a result, hackers might be able to crash versions of the application, thereby loading exploit code onto vulnerable systems. Viewing a malicious message containing a specially malformed UTF-8 string would be enough to trigger the attack.

"The MSN protocol is a known attack vector for this vulnerability. However, exploitation could potentially occur using any supported protocol," an advisory by iDefense warns.

Users are advised to update to a patched version of Trillian - version 3.1.6.0 - in order to guard against attack, as explained in an posting on Cerulean Studios' Trillian blog here. ®

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