TMC Hit with IE 8 JScript WSH Bug

For my more technical readers you will appreciate a story which crashed TMC servers and caused hours of hard work to pinpoint the problem. Thankfully these were noncritical servers used to crunch billions of log records correlating to TMCnet usage patterns, etc.

What happened was Windows Update was inadvertently run and IE 8 was installed on a machine and with it came a new algorithm to run Jscript via Windows Scripting Host (WSH). The result was a hard-coded crash as reported here.

This incident shows how in an interconnected and complex world of software, a single change to one program could lead to disastrous results experienced by other seemingly unrelated programs. Moreover it is just a reminder how dangerous software can be when it automatically updates and in turn brings down other components or entire systems.

Finally, I hope someone from Microsoft checks this problem out to ensure it can’t be used do devise a buffer overflow or related sort of attack.

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