Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Microsoft might have rushed out an emergency critical patch for Windows, out of the update cycle and in order to stop the bleeding from a privately reported vulnerability. But has it been enough to prevent a hacker spread infection getting into the open Windows wound?
The emergency OS sticking plaster was required,
it would seem, because of a vulnerability that had been reported
privately and impacted upon the Server service for all versions of
Windows from 2000 onwards.
That said it was Windows 200, XP and Server 2003 that would be most
vulnerable to the remote code execution attacks if they were in receipt
of the correctly crafted and malicious RPC request that could enable
the running or arbitrary code without authentication.
Users of Windows Vista and Server 2008 do not escape either, as Microsoft has the patch tagged as 'important' even for them.
Unfortunately, it may be a little too late for many people. Especially
those users of the older Windows systems who do not have automatic
updates activated. A worm called Gimmiv has already been detected -
with sample code posted online to help others exploit the security hole.
Microsoft had, one has to assume, already seen other exploits in the
wild or it would not have take the emergency patching action in the
first place. Unfortunately, the very act of releasing the patch in this
way has alerted malicious idiots to the fact the vulnerability exists.
Since the patch announcement there has been a 25 percent increase in
network scanning activity looking for this specific vulnerability. With
the release of the Gimmiv source code, expect a flurry of password
stealing attacks in the coming days and weeks.
It surely is just a matter of time before that code is converted into
some ready made tool for the script kiddie hackers to use...
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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