Nearly a month to the day after the Blaster worm began tearing through the Internet, Microsoft Corp. reported three newly identified flaws in the Windows RPC protocol, two of which are quite similar to the one that Blaster attacks.
The most recent vulnerabilities include two buffer overruns and a denial-of-service (DoS) flaw—all of which are found in the RPCSS service.
An attacker who exploits one of the buffer overruns can run any code on a vulnerable machine. Exploiting the DoS flaw results in the failure of the RPCSS service.
To remedy the vulnerabilities, the company issued a new patch (www.microsoft.com/security/security_bulletins/ms03-039.asp) that supersedes the one it released to fix the earlier flaw.