Glaswegian

It has been a week since hackers released software that could be used to attack a flaw in Windows Vista and Server 2008, but Microsoft and security companies say that criminals haven't done much with the attack.

Microsoft said it hadn't seen any attacks that used the vulnerability, an analysis that was echoed by security companies such as SecureWorks, Symantec and Verisign's iDefense unit.

While criminals jumped on a similar flaw a year ago, using it in widespread attacks that ultimately forced Microsoft to rush out a security patch ahead of its monthly set of security updates, that hasn't happened with this latest bug, which lies in the SMB v2 software used by Vista and Server 2008 to do file-and-printer sharing.

SecureWorks researcher Bow Sineath said Tuesday that there are several reasons why this latest attack has not been picked up. Perhaps the main reason is that the Metasploit code doesn't work as reliably as last year's MS08-067 attack, and often causes the computer to simply crash instead of running the hacker's software.

SMB v2 is typically blocked at the firewall, and it does not ship with Windows XP, meaning that the Metasploit attack will not work on the majority of PCs. Vista, the only Windows client that is vulnerable to the attack, is used on about 19 percent of computers that surf the web, according to web analytics firm Net Applications. Windows XP runs on 72 percent of PCs.

Because of all of these factors, the SMB v2 flaw is simply not "all that popular of a target," Sineath said.

Last week, Dave Aitel, CEO of security tool vendor Immunity, predicted that Microsoft would not need to patch the bug ahead of its scheduled 13 October security patch date.


http://news.techworld.com/security/3...-code/?olo=rss