Windows XP Flaw 'Extremely Serious'

scottott wrote to mention a Washington Post article with the news that the security hole we mentioned on Wednesday has widened. Computers can now be infected just by visiting infected web sites, or looking at images in the preview panel of older versions of Outlook. From the article: "At first, the vulnerability was exploited by just a few dozen Web sites. Programming code embedded in these pages would install a program that warned victims their machines were infested with spyware, then prompted them to pay $40 to remove the supposed pests. Since then, however, hundreds of sites have begun using the flaw to install a broad range of malicious software. SANS has received several reports of attackers blasting out spam e-mails containing links that lead to malicious sites exploiting the new flaw, Ullrich said."

Comments

Why aren't computers allowed to have the flu?

[wysiwia]

We humans have it, animals also, so why not computers? Lets the computers have the flu.

The computer liberation front!

Umm no

[Anonymous Coward]

I get urked as much as the next guy by Windows. Many more issues are with Windows XP especially SP1 than Win2k, or 98. However OSX is not to far behind interms of issues: October security update 1 for tiger introduced a potentiall SSH problem. Panther Security patch 2-10-2005 had a problem with ARD etc. Linux has many many gcc 2/3 and transitional flaws (Ie CVS can be used as a way to introduce trojans) SubVersion can be used to do the same to. Gentoo while more "secure' and 'powerfull' requires time, lots of time. Many of you ask: why is it that such and such can't 'just' switch to ____ flavour of Unix? The answer is entrenchment, and by and large up to 2002/3 M$ has historicly turned a blined eye to the huge amounts of piracy they get, converting to Unix for the unwashed masses is fairly impratticle to.

and in other news

[griffindj]

4 out of 5 doctor's agree that Cancer is serious