A program exploiting a Windows flaw reported last week by Microsoft is said to mean a very short time between warning and worm, if the program becomes used to create worms to spread around Windows, analysts tell E-Commerce Times.
There have been no reports of attacks using the exploit program so far, despite July 25 warnings that weekend attacks were possible, E-Commerce Times said, but Gartner vice president of research Richard Stiennon told reports any such exploitation of the Windows flar could reach any and all Windows and Internet users.
"The vulnerability's too widespread," he said. "There are tens of millions of servers and hundreds of millions of PCs - they're not all going to be patched. We're not going to be protected at all from this."
The Windows flaw in question involved remote procedure call protocols which let codes execute from remote machines in the Windows system, "consistent with the pattern of vulnerability followed by exploit followed by attack," E-Commerce Times said.
And using that exploit, the online news site continued, means attackers can get remote access and system privilege with "malformed" messages "using the Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) services, an RPC interface that listens on TCP/IP port 135, according to the research group that informed Microsoft of the vulnerability."
