World's end and MS06-040 Exploit

Just after Microsoft released their patch for MS06-040 and in the few days before that, there was a huge hue and cry as to how the world will end due to a worm outbreak !

But things happened otherwise. LURHQ has a nice article on this titled: "MS06-040 Exploit: More Hype Than Threat".

Interestingly the bot exploiting this vulnerability is using the compromised machines for relaying spam ! Business minded hackers/crackers are here. This might be the trend of things to come. There is nothing gained in releasing a worm and crippling the internet to a great extent. Business savvy hackers/crackers can instead make some money out of the exploits if they release it in small quantities out in the wild to avoid detection. The more the impact the more the attention and more would be the prevention measures. Instead an attack which targets relatively few machines rather than the whole internet, would at the least assure of some financial gain.

As it is said, it is futile to kill the goose which lays the golden eggs.

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