As of Thursday Morning a new Virus Patch was released, due to a powerful virus that is literally taking over peoples operating systems.  Here is a little more information on what this Virus can do, and what you can do to protect yourself from it. From The Threat Expert’s Blog.

Critical vulnerability in Server Service has only been patched by Microsoft (MS08-067), as a new worm called Gimmiv.A has found to be exploiting it in-the-wild.

Once executed, the worm will drop 3 files: winbase.dll, basesvc.dll and syicon.dll into the directory %System%\Wbem\basesvc.dll.

It will then install and start up a new service called BaseSvc with the display name “Windows NT Baseline”. The service BaseSvc will force svchost.exe to load the DLL winbase.dll which is specified as a ServiceDll parameter for BaseSvc.

Once loaded, winbase.dll will load 2 additional DLLs into the address space of the system process services.exe: basesvc.dll and syicon.dll.

After dropping and loading the aforementioned DLLs, the worm will collect system information from the compromised computer, collect passwords from the Windows protected storage and Outlook Express passwords cache, and post collected details to a remote host. The details are posted in an encrypted form, by using AES (Rijndael) encryption.

Details collected by Gimmiv.A are then posted to a personal profile of the user “perlbody”, hosted with http://www.t35.com hosting provider. At this time, the collected details are displayed at this link.

At the time of this writing, there are 3,695 entries in that file. Every line contains an encrypted string, which could potentially conceal current victims’ details, indirectly indicating how many victims have been compromised by this worm so far.

This is one of the worst virus’s known to attack Windows. This leads me to think whether Microsoft needs to switch off their operating system, and revamp the whole windows experience in General. Windows has been based off of their previous operating system for the past few OS’s. Maybe it’s time for them to erase their “memory” and start from scratch. The updates for Windows are being needed more and more often, filling up the hard drive of Windows users. Macintosh’s on the other hand only have 1 known virus able to attack their operating system.

This leaves the question of what Windows plans to do With Windows 7. We have already heard rumors that it is yet again going to be based off of previous Windows Machines, with not much more of a secure system. Yes of course it’s going to look a little nicer, but is it going to cover all of the problems we have grown to know with a Windows operating system.

What are your thoughts? What do you think needs to happen with the Windows OS? Please feel free to email me by clicking here or comment below. I am really interested in knowing what you know about the world of technology.

Thanks Brad