A new paper from Verizon Business identifies a way to bypass Internet Explorer Protected Mode and gain elevated privileges once he s successfully exploited a bug on the system. The technique enables the attacker to move from a relatively un-privileged level to one with higher privileges, giving him complete access to the logged-in user’s account. Other software vendors have followed Microsoft’s lead, introducing sandboxes in applications such as Adobe Reader X and Google Chrome. The paper says the attack assumes the existence of exploitable memory corruption vulnerability within Internet Explorer or an extension.
Source: https://threatpost.com/researchers-bypass-internet-explorer-protected-mode-120310/74734/