"There's enough code circulating out there that any moderately competent programmer could put together a worm," he said. "It's knitting at this point. You know what to do, it just takes a certain amount of time to do it."
That, coupled with a critical and remotely executable vulnerability on public-facing Web servers poses a significant threat for organizations that haven't patched vulnerable Windows servers, according to Wysopal.
Attacks could come in the form of malformed WebDAV requests to a machine running IIS version 5.0. Because WebDAV requests typically use the same port as other Web traffic (Port 80), attackers would only need to be able to establish a connection with the Web server to exploit the vulnerability, Microsoft said.
Also on Wednesday, Microsoft provided an updated patch for the WebDAV vulnerability that covers Windows NT 4.0.
The Redmond, Wash.-based company knew in March that the vulnerable ntdll.dll component existed in NT 4.0 in addition to Windows 2000. However, NT 4.0 does not support WebDAV and was not vulnerable to attack, so no patch for that platform was supplied at that time, Microsoft said.
Microsoft could not immediately comment on whether the decision to supply a patch for the NT 4.0 platform means that systems running that operating system are also vulnerable to exploitation by the new vulnerability.
Citadel, Microsoft and others strongly recommend that customers using IIS version 5.0 on Windows 2000 or Windows NT apply the patch at the earliest possible opportunity.
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