The UK's top UK security co-ordination agency today warned of a series of vulnerabilities involving implementations of the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) protocol within email and web security products. In a series of eight technical advisories the UK's National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Centre (NISCC) explains how malformed MIME constructs might be exploited to allow attackers to bypass content checking and antivirus tools. MIME is a standard method for encoding email attachments so the extent of the problem highlights a gaping security hole that might be used by virus writers to smuggle hostile code past security defences.

By John Leyden at The Register.

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