Topic awaiting preservation: Crazy thing just happened

I was talking to someone on Trillian (an IM client which supports AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, and other clients all at once) and surfing a web page. As I load a new web page, the computer freezes.

I restart.

I check the conversation log file of the person I was talking to when the computer froze, and at the end of the log is the source code of the web page that was loading, along with other gibberish. The page was loading in Internet Explorer, which has nothing at all to do with Trillian.

My guess is that the operating system (Win XP) gave one program access to another program's memory. After Trillian copied some part of memory into the log file, the OS crashed. Imagine if you could replicate that? That'd be one crazy security vulnerability. Grab another program's memory, write it to a file somewhere, and read it later on. Weee.

wooo man! that would freak me out Yes you are right. Talk about security vulnerability!

Later,

C:\


~Binary is best~

Damnit I've been foiled!!!

*goes back to work on different way to become rich through hacking*

:::krets.net:::

actually, they might just have used a commen dll (and there are many of those that a lot of windows programs use)
since that's only loaded once, it would be a better explanation than 'giving access to another program's memory' - which is really prohibited by the extended mode of your x86 compatible processor, and not windows...