Five-year-old design flaw found in all Windows versions

Microsoft engineers spend Thanksgiving holidays writing patch.

During the Kiwicon conference earlier this month, ethical hacker Beau Butler from New Zealand disclosed a design flaw in Windows that could potentially affect millions of users. Said flaw seems to have been first discovered and, apparently, fixed more than five years ago, but this fix has turned out to be only partially effective, Australian newspaper The Age reports.

A Microsoft spokesman confirmed that this is a serious issue and asked Butler and The Age not to disclose details of the flaw while Microsoft's security team is working on a fix. The vulnerability is said to occur in all versions of Windows, including Vista, and could lead to hackers taking over many PCs with a single attack. However, while Butler found more than 160.000 computers in New Zealand to be vulnerable, the flaw is reported to only affect computers in countries outside the United States.

26 November 2007

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