The Department of Homeland Security is warning of an imminent attack – on your personal computer or your server at work. There is a patch available, but if enough users don’t install it, the result could be the fastest-spreading destruction in Internet history.
The problem lies with a security hole in the most popular versions of Microsoft’s (Nasdaq: MSFT) ubiquitous Windows operating system. Joshua Brown, chief security goon for The Motley Fool, says this one is particularly dangerous because it would give a hacker, in essence, “full control over a compromised system.”
Adding to the problem is the breadth of systems affected: Windows NT 4.0, Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Services Edition, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003.
Aside from the fact that Windows XP has been “shipping on essentially every home computer sold in the last 12-18 months,” Brown says, the vulnerability also affects every server running Microsoft operating systems – “which is the sizeable majority of all server systems in production.”
Aside from other destruction, all of this means hackers could release a virus or worm that has the potential to spread faster than the recent “CodeRed” worm.
Homeland Security officials expect a wide-scale attack any day now because of “an Internet-wide increase in scanning for vulnerable computers over the past several days.” If you’re a computer owner or administrator running the software in question, you can update your Windows operating system by visiting this link. Doing so will eliminate this particular vulnerability.
Sounds like a hoax to me (without saying it might not be true but exagerated, microsoft churns out security patches every week it seems heh)…lot’s of ppl fall for those and it’s not good…some of these things ask ppl to check if they have certain files in their pc telling them it’s a virus when it’s really windows files so most windows versions have them…
Either way there is nothin about this on the oficial Department of Homeland Security site so it’s almost centairly a hoax.
Also no patch like this is listed on windows update which would be the first place the patch would appear.
I’ll edit this post if I find more info on this but if it’s not a very widely spread hoax no site is going to be reporting it…
I wonder what the link (which wasn’t pasted here) has however, hopefully not something harmful…be careful whoever gets this mail, I wouldn’t install a windows patch that is not listed on the official Microsoft site if I were you and even if it IS listed for someone * (because perhaps I downloaded it already since I use windows update often, as everyone should do) *just get it from the microsoft windows update site, not anywhere else, just to be safe
Well, even if it is true, it probably is just a serious exaggeration and nothing to worry about. Remember how spooked a lot of people were about the Y2K virus and it turned out to be nothing but a minor thing?
