Attacks to failure in Windows XP affect 10 times more Portugal

Portugal is the country most affected by the exploitation of a Windows XP flaw that has been gaining expression in recent days.

“We have been monitoring active attacks related to the vulnerability in the Windows Help and Support Center vulnerability since the alert was released on June 10,” explains a Microsoft report published on Technet. “The main targets in terms of the volume of attacks have been the United States, Russia, Portugal, Germany and Brazil,” adds the note.

And when the analysis uses the regional saturation rate as a criterion, Portugal stands out even more for the high concentration of attacks. “More than ten times the world average per computer,” says Microsoft, which illustrates the situation on a graph.

Russia is the second most punished country, with an average of attacks eight times higher than the figures found worldwide.

Microsoft Chart

Microsoft explains that shortly after the warning of the existence of the flaw was released, proofs of concept emerged, developed by legitimate investigators, but in the last few days the situation has changed. but last week, attempts to take advantage of the flaw multiplied, as did the geographies and targets defined by the attackers.

Microsoft announced on June 10 that it was investigating reports of a new flaw in the Windows Help and Support Center, a feature offered with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

The vulnerability in question, as the company explained at the time, could allow remote code execution. The fault still has no correction. On June 11, Microsoft only made available, on the site addressed to programmers, some coordinates that allow changing settings and bypass the vulnerability exploits, detected up to that time.

Until the past 30 days, when it updated information about attack attempts counted taking advantage of the vulnerability, Microsoft said that 10,000 computers had hitherto had contact with exploits of the vulnerability.