SAN FRANCISCO -- A program Microsoft instructed customers to use to fix a hole in its Windows software, which is vulnerable to attack by the Blaster/Lovsan worm that infected computers this week, may itself be flawed.
A glitch in the Microsoft Windows Update patch-management system used to download Windows software fixes has tricked some customers into thinking their systems were patched to prevent Lovesan, when they really were not, said Russ Cooper, moderator of a mailing list with 30,000 subscribers that tracks Microsoft's software weaknesses.
"I know of numerous companies -- more than 10 -- with thousands of computers among them that have run into this problem," Cooper said. The problem is a result of the way Windows Update checks that a computer has run a particular patch, Cooper says. As of Wednesday, Windows Update only checked a database to see that the patch for Blaster/Lovesan had been run on a particular computer in the past -- not that the patch was installed and working.
It left open the possibility that computers that crashed during the process, were unexpectedly turned off or simply didn't have enough memory to install the software patch inaccurately reflected that the patch was successfully installed, when in some cases it wasn't, Cooper said.
Microsoft had no comment.
http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/bugtraq/2003-08/0231.html
Re: CNN: 'Explores Possibility that Power Outage is Related to Internet Worm'
From: Virtual Master (vmastermmd.ath.cx)
Date: Fri Aug 15 2003 - 13:49:06 CDT
The german publishing house "heise", producing the magazines c't and ix, got a news on their page mentioning a probable link between the worm and the power outage.
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/ju-15.08.03-001/
The article is in german, but I'm trying to translate the important pieces to english:
The failing niagara power-plant belongs to National Grid USA. That power-supplier is listed as a reference customer of Northern Dynamics. Norhtern Dynamics labeled themselves as "Home of the OPC Experts" and offer a range of products that use OPC for control and operation systems.
OPC stands for "Ole for process control" and is based on microsofts COM/DCOM model. In a network affected by the W32.Blaster worm the DCOM-communcation fails, and therefor OPC fails on unpatched systems.
OPC is employed among other things for the linking of so called SCADA systems (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), as used by power-plants.
The OPC experts from northern dynamics also list General Electrics, Siemens AG, european power-plant constructor ABB and the european organization for nuclear research as reference customers.
(end of 'copy')
ANY OTHER MENTIONS OF THIS SEEN?