Feb 11, 2009 | 05:29 PM
By Tim Wilson DarkReading

Just a few weeks after President Obama won his fight to keep his BlackBerry, the handheld's security is causing concern again.

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion this week is warning users about a newly discovered vulnerability that could potentially enable an attacker to gain remote control of the device or crash its browser.

Given a "Common Vulnerability Scoring System rating of 9.3 on a 10-point scale, which means the vulnerability is highly dangerous and potentially easy to exploit..."

The flaw was found in the BlackBerry's Web Application Loader, an ActiveX feature that enables the handheld to load new applications via the Internet Explorer browser. RIM says that "an exploitable buffer overflow" exists in the BlackBerry Application Web Loader ActiveX control.

According to an advisory issued by US-CERT, the flaw may be exploited by phishers or other attackers. "By convincing a user to view a specially crafted HTML document, an attacker may be able to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user," the advisory says. "The attacker could also cause Internet Explorer to crash."

US-CERT says the vulnerability has been assigned a Common Vulnerability Scoring System rating of 9.3 on a 10-point scale, which means the vulnerability is highly dangerous and potentially easy to exploit.

continue "darkreading"