A zero-day Java exploit found for sale in the criminal underground has renewed calls to disable the cross-platform runtime environment in Web browsers.
The latest exploit of a vulnerability not yet publicly known
was reported on Tuesday by Brian Krebs, author of the KrebsonSecurity blog. An established member of the Underweb forum, an invitation-only site, was selling the exploit for Java JRE 7 Update 9, the latest version of the platform. The expected price was in the "five digits."
The flaw was in the Java class "MidiDevice.Info," a component that handles audio input and output, Krebs said. The seller claimed "code execution was very reliable" on Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows 7.
The latest exploit discovery comes three months after two other zero-day vulnerabilities and exploit code
were found, one by a security researcher at Accuvant and the other by a developer at Immunity. The flaws were in Java 7 and affected Windows, Mack OS X and Linux operating systems running a browser with a Java plug-in.
