A FIVE year old bug, which is only a problem for PCs outside the US, has resurfaced. According to Associated Press, Volish engineers were working frantically through-out the Thanksgiving holiday break to come up with a patch for the defect. The bug was demonstrated at the Kiwicon hacker conference in New Zealand last week by an ethical hacker, Beau Butler. The hole makes it easy for a hacker to take control of vast numbers of home or office PCs around the world in a single attack.
Butler found more than 160,000 computers in NZ were vulnerable. Out of a population of four million, excluding sheep and kiwi fruit who do not own a PC, that number is fairly significant. Details of the hack have not been printed on the world wide wibble yet because Microsoft have admitted that the security hole is very serious. Vole first had a look at the problem five years ago and came up with a fix. However it was only a partial fix and depended on how the computer was configured. It also applies to Vista
Windows, Exploit, Vulerability
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