Santy Claws at Vulnerable Web Sites

Sing to the tune of Jingle Bells:

Dashing through the holes,
A new worm spreads today,
Through the shields it goes,
Hacking all the way.

Due to vulnerable code,
That wasn't built quite right,
Oh how easy it is to find
Vulnerable sites tonight!

Jingle bells, jingle bells,
Jingle all the way.
Oh wake up! It's time to patch
Another hole today...

As I wrote in a previous blog entry, "

Security Patching: We'll Get Around To It In A Couple of Years ," some people don't realize the need to patch their systems in a timely fashion and a result might experience embarrassing incidents that need not happen.

A new worm, dubbed Santy.A, was unleashed on the Web. The worm used Google to find sites that contain a vulnerability in the popular Web-based forum software phpBB . People who hadn't installed the latest version found their forums defaced with an embarassing message.