Organisations, companies and individuals running Samba are highly encouraged to update the software. It took researchers only 15 minutes to exploit this vulnerability.
Cybersecurity researchers have warned of increased cyberattacks in the wake of a newly found vulnerability in a widely used networking software, which potentially leaves thousands of computers open to attack similar to WannaCry.
This announcement was made by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday. It has urged administrators to update their networking software and patch the vulnerability before it is exploited by hackers.
Rebekah Brown of Rapid7, a cybersecurity company, disclosed that in the 12 hours since the existence of the vulnerability was made public, there has been no signs of attacks being based on it.
She however cautioned that it took researchers only 15 minutes to develop malware that can exploit this vulnerability.
“This one seems to be very, very easy to exploit,” said Brown.
In a response to e-mailed questions, Rapid7 disclosed it had found more than 100,000 computers running vulnerable versions of the software, Samba, which is freely distributed in Linux and Unix distros. There are likely to be many more such computers.
She went on to add, since most computers were found to be running older versions of Samba, it is very likely that these cannot be patched, said Brown.
Although many of these computers appears to belong to organizations and companies, many belonged to home users.
Significantly, the vulnerability has the potential to create a worm, much like WannaCry, which could spread quickly.
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