Microsoft rushed out patch to prevent ‘worm’ exploit

Microsoft has revealed the emergency patch it released outside of the Patch Tuesday cycle was to prevent an internet worm from spreading.

The MS08-067 patch, which was rated as ‘critical’, fixed a vulnerability could have been used in the creation of a wormhole exploit.

More specifically, it resolved a privately reported vulnerability in the server service. According to the security bulletin, the buffer overflow vulnerability allowed remote code execution if the affected system received a specially crafted RPC request.

Graham Cluley, senior technical consultant at Sophos, said that the vulnerability was very serious and that ID administrators were advised to patch the affected systems as a priority in case hackers chose to exploit it with an internet worm.

SophosLab’s principle researcher Vanja Svajcer said that the last time he saw a similar vulnerability was in 2004 with the W32/Sasser worm.

He said: “It remains to be seen how interested the virus writers will be in this vulnerability, considering a general trend towards hidden malware that does not replicate.

“The noise of generated network traffic seen with large scale outbreaks of self-replicating malware may not appeal to modern day virus writers.”

Security vendor Symantec said that while it had not seen wide-spread exploitation of the issue, it did see reports of a certain file in 'n2.exe' being downloaded on certain computers, which it was investigating.

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