A Manchester based security company named Secarma has issued a warning to all Microsoft Windows 2003 users that their computers are vulnerable to a new cyber attack named ExplodingCan which is similar to that of last month’s WannaCry.
Experts from the said UK based company say that ExplodingCan can prove as a devastating cyber exploit as it can target more than 375,000 computers which are operating worldwide. And if sources are to be believed half of the said number of computers are operating in Australia.
Technically speaking, ExplodingCan which has been created by a hacking group called Shadow Brokers targets PCs running Windows 2003 server version. The said NSA exploit infects Internet Information Services Version 6.0 (IIS 6.0) Web Server and so all those PCs running Windows 2003 server version will be vulnerable to ExplodingCan cyber attack.
Paul Harris, managing director of Secarma said in a press statement that ExplodingCan can be categorized into the same category as the Wannacry attack as it exploits the flaws in the Windows 2003 operating system and makes way for the hackers to plant malware such as ransomware on victim computers.
Mr. Harris added that the exploit which has been code named as ExplodingCan will prove as an attacking gateway to cyber crooks and hacking teams as it opens up internal parts of the affected PC to a wide variety of different attack vectors.
As per the stats released by Secarma, more than 300,000 PCs are working on Windows 2003 OS version and are not supported by Microsoft anymore.
So, if a cyber attack is launched on these PCs using IIS 6.0 server exploit, it can yield devastating consequences on at least 40k servers for sure.
And the only way to save your PCs from being cyber attacked with ExplodingCan is to upgrade your server software to the latest version of Windows OS such as Windows Server 2016 as it gets regular security patch updates.
