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.
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Received on Thu May 3 06:26 CDT 2001