A heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability was found in icedtea-web, a web browser plugin for running applets written in the Java programming language. If a user were tricked into opening a malicious website, an attacker could cause the plugin to crash or possibly execute arbitrary code as the user invoking the program. This problem was initially discovered by Arthur Gerkis and got assigned CVE-2012-4540. Fixes where applied in the 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 branches but not to the 1.4 branch.