Month: May 2019

Enlarge (credit: SandboxEscaper)

A serial publisher of Microsoft zeroday vulnerabilities has dropped exploit code for three more unpatched flaws, marking the seventh time the unknown person has done so in the past year.

Technical details of the vulnerabilities, along with working proof-of-concept exploits, are the work of someone using the moniker SandBoxEscaper. A local privilege-escalation vulnerability in the Windows Task Scheduler that was disclosed on Tuesday allows an authenticated attacker to gain SYSTEM privileges on an affected system. On Thursday, the person released a privilege escalation code that exploits a bug in the Windows Error Reporting service. Attackers can use it to modify files that would normally be off limits. A third exploit, which was also released Wednesday, works against Internet Explorer 11 and allows attackers to execute a JavaScript that runs with higher system access than is normally permitted by the browser sandbox.

Decent deal

Like the other exploits SandboxEscaper has published over the past year—including this one Ars covered last August and this one from last October—the three recent ones don’t allow attackers to remotely execute malicious code. Still, as security defenses in recent versions of Windows and other operating systems have improved, the value of these types of exploits has grown, since they are often the only way to bypass security sandboxes and similar protections. Despite some limitations in the exploit that were transparently noted by SandBoxEscaper, the disclosures are significant if they work as purported against fully patched versions of Windows 10.

Enlarge (credit: Loron, et. al.)

When did the first complex multicellular life arise? Most people, being a bit self-centered, would point to the Ediacaran and Cambrian, when the first animal life appeared and then diversified. Yet studies of DNA suggest that fungi may have originated far earlier than animals.

When it comes to a fossil record, however, things are rather sparse. No unambiguous evidence of a fungus appears in fossils until after the Cambrian was over. A few things from earlier may have looked fungus-like, but the evidence was limited to their appearance. It could be that fungi branched off at the time suggested by the DNA but didn't evolve complex, multicellular structures until later. Alternatively, the fossils could be right, and there's something off about the DNA data. Or, finally, it could be that we simply haven't found old enough fossils yet.

A new paper out in today's Nature argues strongly for the last option. In it, a small team of researchers describe fossils of what appear to be fungi that could be up to a billion years old. And the researchers back up the appearance with a chemical analysis.