, 2006-01-04
A few hundred million Windows XP machines lay vulnerable on the Web today, a week after a zero-day exploit was discovered. Meanwhile, new approaches and ideas from the academic world - that focus exclusively on children - may give us hope for the future after all.
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Zero-day holiday
2006-01-04
Anonymous (2 replies)
Anonymous (2 replies)
Not a real solution
2006-01-05
Mike Warot (1 replies)
Mike Warot (1 replies)
There is somewhere in the neighbourhood of 400 Million machines running Microsoft Windows. Some estimates suggest up to half of those are now Windows XP. That's 200 Million machines, give or take.
If just 1% of the install base is affected, that's 2 Million machines. One percent is a very small amount. Considering how very easy it is to exploit this vulnerability, already found on thousands of websites visited by millions of people, 1% may in fact be a very conservative number.
MS Blaster was originally thought to have infected ten of thousands - perhaps hundreds of thousands of machines. The final count was somewhere OVER 25 MILLION machines. A patch was readily available at the time, too.
If you disagree with the severity of this threat, perhaps you should look at what Secunia, F-Secure, SANS, US-CERT, and Symantec are all saying.
Best regards,
Kelly Martin
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Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/columns/377/32886#32886