IIS Unicode Exploit
IIS Unicode exploits are a type of vulnerability found in Microsoft web servers that allows for the execution of arbitrary code. This post will look at what it is, how it works, and how to protect your system from these types of vulnerabilities. IIS Unicode exploits are a type of vulnerability found in Microsoft web servers (Internet Information Services) that allows for executing arbitrary code. They take advantage of an encoding scheme vulnerability within IIS and can allow an attacker to execute malicious scripts on the victim’s machine without them knowing.
The vulnerability itself is due to a combination of factors. The first is the way IIS allows HTTP requests to be encoded. Secondly, how IIS 5.0, 6.0, and 7.0, handle very long strings in the particular website make this type of attack possible. Lastly, some websites are vulnerable because they are hosted on IIS platforms that permit this attack (e.g., MSN). The severity of the problem with these types of vulnerabilities can be seen in that there is an official patch released by Microsoft to protect against them, at least from IIS 7.0 and above.
Microsoft IIS Unicode Exploits
Unicode is a superset of the Latin, Greek, and other character sets that were previously used on the Internet. Unicode includes more characters than the other character sets, but it also includes unique characters not found in the other character sets. Unicode also includes punctuation, mathematical and text-processing symbols, and identifiers all of which make it a versatile and powerful set of characters. Because Unicode is so useful, hackers use it to perform dangerous cyber attacks.