Security researchers posted code on Tuesday capable of compromising computers running the most recent versions of the Snort open-source intrusion detection system.

The exploit will work in most cases, according to The Hacker's Choice security group, which published the code.

The published exploit comes exactly one week after Internet Security Systems and the US-CERT announced the existence of a flaw in how the Snort preprocessor for BackOrifice parses hostile data. Because the vulnerability only affects the versions of the program less than three months old, a worm that uses the exploit would likely not spread widely.

The vulnerability exists in an update to the way the Snort intrusion detection system handles network data produced by the BackOrifice program, a seven-year-old remote administration tool used by online attackers to control compromised systems. A single specially-crafted user datagram protocol (UDP) packet--the fire-and-forget data of the Internet--could compromise a wide variety of Snort systems using the new exploit.