Interesting exploit with AIM

I accidentally discovered this while sending a large (3MB or so) text document to a friend. I connected and pasted the text in as usual, then hit send and the little progress bar at the bottom came up. So I then went to a different window and did some other things, and having a habit of closing inactive (or so I think) AIM windows, I, without even thinking, closed the window that was sending the text. Well it turns out that when I closed the window I succeeded in locking up my friend's Win98 box. Out of curiousity, I tried the same thing on my own win98 box, and it worked. The same thing happens on XP also, but it is more likely that you can recover. So it appears AIM is not the most stable application while files are being sent/recieved. It only seemed to work for me with text, but I only tried mp3 and avi as the other format.

I guess you can report it yo AIM for a patch or something.. I don't use the pogram but to my knowledge there are quite a few people using it, so... Nice job though [despite it being luck :)]

Good job on finding that exploit. Wonder how long it will take AOL to patch it though...hmm...
I tried it on my 98 box as well and it froze. Txt files were the only ones to have any issue with it.

there was a dissussion in another thread here a few days ago about this same condition existing with image files that end before the EOF. aol knows about it theres even a tut on it at neworder aol may or may not be doing something about it i didn't bother to find out


id like to add that the people that would "use" this flaw are the same ones that throw dummies off of highway over passes and break bottles on sharp curves

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Originally posted here by Tedob1
id like to add that the people that would "use" this flaw are the same ones that throw dummies off of highway over passes and break bottles on sharp curves

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Very good analogy, Tedob1. Hoorah!

just for my own info, i did some looking around on google, and it appears this has been a problem for quite some time. aol is notoriuos for not caring about bugs like this

Just look at their role as an ISP - surely if they are going to use their own dialup program, not the standard windows one, they should make it work?

They will probably wait a new version of AIM before patching this flaw seriously. They don't really care with this sort of things as long as the huge majority of users keep their calm and go on using their services.

Congrats for discovering this, Viper2026.