Microsoft's MS05-051 bulletin

If you haven't deployed your fix yet you might be in trouble. The vulnerability I'm talking about has to do with a bug in the Windows component for transaction processing, or the Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (MSDTC).

Microsoft tagged this flaw as "critical", so it's not your average patch and go operation, Microsoft addressed the flaw in security bulletin MS05-051.

A Microsoft representative said: "Initial investigation of this exploit code has verified that successful exploitation could lead to a denial of service attack... and not remote code execution". This essentially means that the attacker takes full control over your PC with remote execution after making your computer crash.

The patch has been available since October 11th and users who have applied it should be protected against the flaw.
Microsoft will include this in the latest batch of security updates on December 13th.

Here's an executive summary directly from their website: "This update resolves several newly-discovered, privately-reported vulnerabilities. Each vulnerability is documented in this bulletin in its own "Vulnerability Details" section of this bulletin. An attacker who successfully exploited the most severe of these vulnerabilities could take complete control of an affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. We recommend that Windows 2000 and Windows XP Service Pack 1 customers apply the update immediately. We recommend that customers using other operating system versions apply the update at the earliest opportunity."

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