Microsoft reinforced the remediation alert for the security flaw affecting the Help and Support Center. The vulnerability has had a patch available since yesterday, with the patch package released by the company under the usual Patch Tuesday.
With regard to the launch, the company spoke again on the subject, to underline that the number of computers victims of attacks attempts from exploits security problem – which affects Windows XP and Windows 2003 users – has been increasing rapidly.
The flaw in question allows remote code execution and has already put Portugal at the top of the table of most affected countries, made available by the company in the first alert on the subject.
At the time, 10,000 attempts at attack had been detected and Portugal was the country most affected by the problem. The new information provided by the owner of Windows shows changes in the organization of the regional table of computers attacked following the problem.
Russia was, at midnight last Monday, the country with the highest number of attacked computers, with an average of 10 times more attacks than that seen in the rest of the world, a situation identical to what was reported to Portugal in the first alert.
Between the first and the second warning issued by the company, the number of computers affected by exploits failure increased from 10,000 to 25,000, showing rapid evolution. Cases have been detected in about 100 countries, making the incidence of rapid expansion non-significant.
The flaw affecting the Windows XP support center was identified by a Google engineer in June and released before Microsoft had time to move forward with a fix. Patch only arrived last Tuesday and was classified as a critical fix.
