Microsoft Investigating Mouse Tracking Flaw in Internet Explorer
Microsoft is looking into a vulnerability in Internet Explorer that allows hackers to track cursor movement even when the browser is minimized.
On Thursday Microsoft said that it is looking into claims that a vulnerability in Internet Explorer allows hackers to track mouse activity on a screen even when the browser is not being actively used. News of the vulnerability surfaced on Wednesday, reporting that the problem resides in Internet Explorer versions 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10.
The browser flaw was originally spotted by Spider.io months ago, and then reported to Microsoft on October 1. The security analytics firm said that the Microsoft Security Research Center acknowledged the IE vulnerability, but the Redmond company stated that there were no immediate plans to patch this vulnerability in existing versions of the browser.
The IE vulnerability reportedly compromises the security of virtual keyboards and virtual keypads. Malware doesn't need to be installed. Instead, an attacker can simply buy display advertising on a site and insert non-malicious code into the ad itself. Thus when a user visits a website with the ad on display, the hacker can track their cursor movement while the page remains open.
Even more, cursor movement is recorded even if the web surfer is on another tab or out on the desktop with the browser minimized. Thus, as long as the web page remains open in Internet Explorer, the attacker can record everything the end-user's mouse does on-screen including making Skype calls and more.
"Internet Explorer’s event model populates the global Event object with some attributes relating to mouse events, even in situations where it should not," the security analytics firm said. "Combined with the ability to trigger events manually using the fireEvent() method, this allows JavaScript in any webpage (or in any iframe within any webpage) to poll for the position of the mouse cursor anywhere on the screen and at any time—even when the tab containing the page is not active, or when the Internet Explorer window is unfocused or minimized. The fireEvent() method also exposes the status of the control, shift and alt keys."
Microsoft told The Next Web on Thursday that it's currently investigating the reported issue, but to date there are no active exploits or customers that have been adversely affected. "We will provide additional information as it becomes available and will take the appropriate action to protect our customers," Microsoft added.
Spider.io states that the vulnerability is already being exploited by at least two display ad analytics companies across billions of page impressions per month.

I wonder if MS is going to patch one of those two browsers IF they get around to the exploit, or at least IE7?...
Anyways, I already installed IE10, but I suppose I'll have wait for a while considering the fact that how easy it is to upload malware-loaded advertisements.
When was there a software that was invulnerable except for ones completely inaccessible by humans (or not created by a human, because a jerk can set a critical embedded software to delete itself at 2012 Dec 21st before loading it to the devices).
If you can somehow get hold of what pages the person visited, and synced the cursor movements with the page histories...
Exactly. On its own, it isn't much. But put it with something else, and you could find it rather ... dreadful.
Because MS IE team saves version numbers to real changes to the browser, it's people like you why FF changed their version numbering to increase their version number(rapid release plan) because idiots like you see larger numbers and think better. IE updates versions all the time with windows update, but they save updates mostly to bug fixes, security updates. Major performance and feature set are saved for full version numbers very similar to Firefox's older release plan. But ever since google shitted up things by having full version numbers for little reasons monzilla and opera both changed their update polices.
Yeah, if you know the page layout then maybe you'd be on to something, but if i'm not wrong, virtual keyboards on banking sites are randomized independently of the page so i doubt it'll matter there.
When you read more about the exploit you get a sense of how hard it would be to exploit it, also it's been around for a long time you can easily port this "exploit" over to firefox, opera and chrome, because it's a feature for ad servers dat click data.