Serious Origin Vulnerability Found

Ars Technica is reporting on a vulnerability within the Origin client which allows a hacker to remotely place malicious software onto a person's PC with even minimal interaction on the part of the victim. The exploit was demonstrated at the Black Hat security conference in Amsterdam, took seconds, and was easy to execute through the Origin clients game launch system on both PC and MAC.

"The Origin platform allows malicious users to exploit local vulnerabilities or features by abusing the Origin URI handling mechanism," ReVuln researchers Donato Ferrante and Luigi Auriemma wrote in a paper accompanying last week's demonstration. "In other words, an attacker can craft a malicious Internet link to execute malicious code remotely on [a] victim's system, which has Origin installed."

The article in question and the paper especially, go into much more detail than I can here, so I suggest you take a look at it yourself. The exploit, however is the same one unmasked on the Steam client last October. Researchers in that case advised Steam users to disable the automatic launching of Steam:// URLs to protect themselves.

Steam, of course, is still going strong but this news will simply pile on an already trepidatious day for EA, who have found themselves suddenly leaderless.