Cyber Security Institute

Friday, November 28, 2008

Hackers publish attack code for last week’s Windows bug

Just a day after downplaying the vulnerability that caused it to issue an out-of-cycle patch last week, Microsoft Corp. late yesterday warned customers that exploit code had gone public and is being used in additional attacks.  “We’ve identified the public availability of exploit code that now shows code execution for the vulnerability addressed by MS08-067,” said Mike Reavey, operations manager of Microsoft’s Security Response Center, in a post to the MSRC blog Monday evening.  “This exploit code has been shown to result in remote code execution on Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000.”

On Tuesday, a company spokesman declined to specify where Microsoft had found the attack code, saying only that the new warning came after Microsoft became “aware of detailed, reliable, public exploit code.”

“We are aware that people are working to develop reliable public exploit code for the vulnerability,” acknowledged Christopher Budd, a spokesman for the MSRC, in an entry he wrote Sunday.

Previously, Microsoft said that it discovered the vulnerability after a small number of attacks had resulted in infections by an information-stealing Trojan, which it dubbed “Win32/MS08067.gen!A” and third-party anti-virus vendors tagged with their own names.  “The malware situation remains the same, as we’ve not seen any self-replicating worms, but instead malware that would be classified as Trojans, specifically the malware we discussed when we released the security update on Thursday.”

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9118341