Bad Music Can Hack Your Computer
Security firm Secunia has released an advisory about a WinAmp MIDI File Handling Buffer Overflow Vulnerability. In short, play a bad MIDI file on your PC with WinAmp, and you could end up getting hacked.
The vulnerability could be exploited by malicious people to cause a DoS (Denial of Service) and potentially compromise a user’s system.
Successful exploitation crashes the application and may allow execution of arbitrary code.
The vulnerability is caused by to a boundary error within the MIDI plug-in (in_midi.dll) when handling MIDI files. This can be exploited to cause a heap-based buffer overflow via a malicious “.mid” file with a specially crafted header.
The vulnerability has been confirmed in version 5.23 and has also been reported in version 5.21. Other versions may also be affected.
Secunia recommends that you only use MIDI files from trusted sources and set another program to open MIDI files by default.
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