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

Posted by   Virus Bulletin on   Nov 26, 2007

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.

Posted on 26 November 2007 by Virus Bulletin

twitter.png
fb.png
linkedin.png
hackernews.png
reddit.png

 

Latest posts:

In memoriam: Prof. Ross Anderson

We were very sorry to learn of the passing of Professor Ross Anderson a few days ago.

In memoriam: Dr Alan Solomon

We were very sorry to learn of the passing of industry pioneer Dr Alan Solomon earlier this week.

New paper: Nexus Android banking botnet – compromising C&C panels and dissecting mobile AppInjects

In a new paper, researchers Aditya K Sood and Rohit Bansal provide details of a security vulnerability in the Nexus Android botnet C&C panel that was exploited in order to gather threat intelligence, and present a model of mobile AppInjects.

New paper: Collector-stealer: a Russian origin credential and information extractor

In a new paper, F5 researchers Aditya K Sood and Rohit Chaturvedi present a 360 analysis of Collector-stealer, a Russian-origin credential and information extractor.

VB2021 localhost videos available on YouTube

VB has made all VB2021 localhost presentations available on the VB YouTube channel, so you can now watch - and share - any part of the conference freely and without registration.

We have placed cookies on your device in order to improve the functionality of this site, as outlined in our cookies policy. However, you may delete and block all cookies from this site and your use of the site will be unaffected. By continuing to browse this site, you are agreeing to Virus Bulletin's use of data as outlined in our privacy policy.