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Same Platform Made Stuxnet, Duqu; Others Lurk
wiredmikey writes "New research from Kaspersky Labs has revealed that the platform dubbed 'tilded' (~d), which was used to develop Stuxnet and Duqu, has been around for years. The researchers say that same platform has been used to create similar Trojans which have yet to be discovered. Alexander Gostev and Igor Sumenkov have put together some interesting research, the key point being that the person(s) behind what the world knows as Stuxnet and Duqu have actually been using the same development platform for several years." An anonymous reader adds a link to this "surprisingly entertaining presentation" (video) by a Microsoft engineer, in which "he tells the story of how he and others analysed the exploits used by Stuxnet. Also surprising are the simplicity of the exploits which were still present in Win7." See also the report at Secureist from which the SecurityWeek story draws.
Windows is still hobbled by backwards compatibility. They have been steadily pruning the system of such compatibility issues over the years, but they still remain.
The print spooler was a compatibility issue, and it wasn't writing files to the system directory of another computer. It was the remote print spooler that was writing to its own system directory.
The shell icon extraction code was probably written for Windows 95, and the LoadLibraryEx was not added until Windows 2000. This is why it was the only exploit that worked on all systems.
The CRC32 bit was definitely not well thought out, but it was most likely not considered to be an attack vector, and only there to prevent file corruption... for which CRC32 is fine.
There are going to be bugs in any non-trivial code, and Windows has a lot of code. Just like Linux has lots of code, and MacOS has lots of code.. you can find these kinds of issues in any OS.
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Writing new code from scratch will not make that code suddenly bug free.