New worm: Zotob.A

Could be a nasty one

[encyclo]

There is a new worm now out "in the wild" (as reported by Slashdot and many others) which exploits a serious Microsoft Windows Plug and Play service vulnerability [microsoft.com] only very recently patched (August 9th) by Microsoft. The worm affects Windows 2000 in particular, and Windows XP only if the Service Pack 2 has not been applied. Me and 98 are not affected.

More information is available here:

[f-secure.com...]

Patches available here:

[microsoft.com...]

Your firewall should be blocking port 445, and if you are running Windows XP without SP2, well, you've asked for it. :) (SP2 has been out for almost a year now, and is more than proving its worth).

[Dynamoo]

I'm about half way through patching 500 machines because of this.. but has anyone actually *seen* the darned thing yet?

[Leosghost]

Encyclo ..do you know of french language pages at MS that I can point people to for their own downloads of the patches?..I am on dailup still and cannot download for all and sundry the usual MS mega patch ...the sizes of the required patches are not indicated "comme d'hab' " at MS ...

Plus my doze is still 98II on the machine that I let talk to the world so MS auto log in may not let me access the stuff anyway..

[Leosghost]

Belay that ..
Just found ..MS technet pages in French refer visitors to download and security pages in US English ..French people will neither be pleased nor understand why the support cannot be provided entirely in their own language ..so the damage will be greater ..very bad PR for MS ...

Tommorrow I can see I will be houscalling more than I anticipated or wanted ..

May well make me richer ..but MS needs to understand that it needs to do full support in all the languages that it sells it's OS in ..Or suffer continual bad press in those areas ...makes it appear arrogant and US centric..what am I saying ..."appear"...

The french office of MS couldn't give a ---* about this or any other issue anyway ..only reasonable service here is the European security team ..which just happens to be based out of the same building as the incredibly arrogant staff of MS France ...

Their attitude .."customer pays for product" .."customer is no longer our problem".. "we are busy arranging the flowers , holidays , whatever" .."we are technocrats"...