Fergie's Tech Blog

Another Windows Bug Open To Zotob-Like Attacks

Gregg Keizer writes in TechWeb News:

Another Windows vulnerability disclosed earlier in August is ripe for exploit, security firm Symantec said Tuesday.

After additional analysis of the Microsoft Print Spooler Service vulnerability, which Microsoft first described August 9 in a bulletin released that day, Symantec alerted customers of its DeepSight Threat Management System to patch the flaw immediately or risk attack.

"We always take the conservative viewpoint in our alerts," said Alfred Huger, the senior director of engineering for Symantec's security response team. "But when we release an alert, we're urging people to patch as soon as possible."

In fact, said Huger, although an exploit has not been seen in the wild, one will. "There's always someone who's smart enough to figure things out, and the law of averages say that an exploit will appear."

In fact, exploits have already been published privately among hacker groups, and are in the hands of customers of vulnerability tools like Immunity's Canvas. Symantec said it wasn't sure whether Immunity's exploit was only proof-of-concept code or what it called a "robust exploit" that could actually attack systems remotely.

Microsoft's original bulletin, marked as MS05-043, rated the bug as "critical," the Redmond, Wash.-based developer's highest alert warning for vulnerabilities. On Windows 2000 PCs, as well as Windows XP and Windows XP SP1, the win32.spl.dll can be exploited remotely via the RPC interface -- the same service used by the dangerous and damaging MSBlast two years ago this month -- and attacked anonymously, in other words, by anyone, even those without a legitimate log-in account.

Windows XP SP2 and Windows Server 2003 are not anonymously exploitable, both Microsoft and Symantec agreed, because of that version's more stringent checks in the RPC interface.

posted by Fergie @ 8/30/2005 12:48:00 PM