'Important' Windows flaw could turn critical - News - ZDNet

'Important' Windows flaw could turn critical - News - ZDNet:
"Security experts are bracing themselves for a spate of new worms and viruses designed to exploit of the seven new vulnerabilities announced by Microsoft on Tuesday as part of its monthly patch cycle.

Of the new vulnerabilities, Windows Shell (MS04-024)--has been picked out by security experts as a potential target for future worms and viruses.

Ben Nagy, senior security engineer at security researcher firm eEye, said he expects the Windows Shell bug to be the most serious threat--despite Microsoft rating the problem as 'important' rather than 'critical'."

According to Microsoft, if a user is vulnerable to MS04-024 and has administrator privileges, an attacker could "take complete control of the affected system, including installing programs; viewing, changing, or deleting data; or creating new accounts with full privileges."

However, the flaw is not rated as critical because it would require "significant user interaction" to work. This means that a user would need to open an e-mail attachment, or download a file from a malicious Web site.

Richard Starnes, president of security industry group ISSA UK, said that malware writers usually reverse-engineer Microsoft's patches in order to produce exploits. Based on his on experience of previous threats, he expects the first batch of new exploit codes to be available as early as next week. These would probably be used to create a worm delivered as an email attachment.…

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS04-024.mspx

http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105-5268989.html