AOL fixes major security hole

By D. Ian Hopper

Associated Press

WASHINGTON – As AOL Time Warner engineers opened their presents and spent time with their families, a team of young hackers planned a holiday surprise: a major security hole in one of the company’s flagship programs.

The international group released a program that turns AOL’s Instant Messenger into a key that could unlock many home computers. Now the hackers are being criticized by security experts for not giving AOL sufficient time to react.

The group, founded by a 19-year-old Utah college student, discovered a security hole in AOL’s Instant Messenger program that could have let a hacker take control of a computer. AOL fixed the problem at its central networks today.

“The issue was resolved early this morning and was handled on the server side, so users do not have to download anything or take any other action,” AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein said. “To our knowledge, no users were affected by this issue prior to its resolution.”

The problem affected the newest as well as many earlier versions of AOL’s Instant Messenger program, which boasts more than 100 million users.

“You could do just about anything: Delete files on the computer or take over the machine,” said Matt Conover, founder of the hackers’ group, “w00w00.”

Conover said w00w00 has more than 30 active members from 14 states and nine foreign countries.

Conover, who attends Utah State University, said the group found the problem several weeks ago but didn’t contact AOL until after Christmas. The group got no response from AOL to an e-mail sent during the holiday week, he said, so w00w00 released details – and a program that takes advantage of it – to public security mailing lists less than a week later.

The program released by w00w00 remotely shut down a user’s Instant Messenger program but could have been modified to do more sinister things.

That practice is under scrutiny by security professionals. While some independent researchers argue for a “full disclosure” policy and say software vendors are trying to hide their mistakes, many companies say users are better protected if companies have time to react.

“I think that’s pretty dangerous,” said Chris Wysopal of the security company AtStake, “especially since they pretty much acknowledged that they hadn’t gotten a response back from AOL yet.”

Russ Cooper, who moderates a popular security mailing list and works for the security firm TruSecure, said Conover’s action was irresponsible because it helped hackers.

“I think it’s better to provide details of the exploit and then let other people write the actual code,” Cooper said. “It lets the technical community have the information they need without letting idiots have the information they want.”

Conover said w00w00 set a New Year’s deadline for sentimental reasons, because it was the anniversary of the group’s last major security release. He defended the disclosure of the attack program because “it means providing all the information we have available to the security community.”

AOL’s Weinstein said the company would have appreciated more warning.

“We’d encourage any software programmer that discovers a vulnerability to bring it to our attention prior to releasing it,” Weinstein said.