http://www.computeruser.com/news/01/05/02/news8.html By Newsbytes Staff May 02, 2001 Malicious hackers have scanned literally millions of Unix-based computer networks of late in search of a particular printer program and network protocol that can be exploited to gain complete control over affected systems, federal computer security experts warned Monday. The National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC), the FBI's cybercrime arm, said it had observed a "very significant increase" in attempts to exploit the weaknesses. According to the alert, the vulnerabilities reside in program called "lpd/LPRng," which handles printer requests across Unix networks. The other weakness involves Sun Microsystems' RPC (remote procedure call), a protocol listening on Port 111 on Unix systems that allows services across a network to communicate with one another. The NIPC said such vulnerabilities could allow malicious hackers to gain "root" access over the affected system, which is then most often used to host and execute a distributed denial of service (DDoS) tool called "mstream." For more information on these two vulnerabilities, check out http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/382365. For the NIPC advisory, visit: http://www.nipc.gov/warnings/alerts/2001/01-010.htm. ISN is hosted by SecurityFocus.com --- To unsubscribe email LISTSERVat_private with a message body of "SIGNOFF ISN".
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu May 03 2001 - 04:21:26 PDT