This hyped Windows flaw

[Darkstar]

Can someone smarter than me break this warning down and tell me how a regular network behind a firewally might be affected?? It's hard to get anything straightforward from MS, and it might look bad if one of our systems fails from such a high-profile vulnerability.

http://news.yahoo.com/fc?tmpl=fc&cid...s_and_crackers

[King Grover]

sounds like SkyNet to me!

[Darkstar]

Sh!t, you meant that bastard is becoming fully aware??

But Miles Dyson is dead!!

[silencio]

RPC is one of those services that connect every windows machine to every other windows machine behind networks and often between firewalls. RPC is one of the ports that is required to be open between domains that live in the dmz but exist in the same forest as regular domains used to manage thousands of users. So once you compromise a single box in the DMZ you have access to the entire network. The same holds true in reverse. Bob gets a trojan on his machine in the secure network that exploits RPC. Since the secure network has access to everything the entire network is compromised.

The big issue isn't that someone is going to use RPC against a firewalled box. The issue is that someone is going to exploit the RPC flaw through one email virus and have access to every single machine in the enterprise within a matter of minutes.