Daily Update -- Wednesday, October 19th, 2005

Not much is in the news today, although I am happy to announce that rumours regarding the discovery of a worm using the latest Windows vulnerabilities was a false alarm.  More details follow

Trend Announces Fanbot.C Error
From InformationWeek:

A security firm on Monday mistakenly identified a new Trojan as the first to exploit one of last week's vulnerabilities in Windows, but corrected itself and labeled it as one which attacks the same bug as August's Zotob bot worm.

Fanbot.c, said Trend Micro late Monday, included a proof-of-concept exploit against one of the vulnerabilities disclosed Tuesday, Oct. 11 in Microsoft's MS05-051 security bulletin. Trend also said that although the Trojan was written in Visual Basic -- which usually indicates low-level skills on the part of the attacker and often means it's a "script kiddy" copy-cat -- arming malware with yet another exploit matched earlier hacker habits.

By early Tuesday, however, Trend had modified its technical description of Fanbot.c to say that the exploit was actually one directed toward the Plug and Play bug unveiled in August's MS05-039 bulletin.

The full article about the good news can be found here.