{"id":171903,"date":"2016-07-14T12:28:26","date_gmt":"2016-07-14T10:28:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=171903"},"modified":"2016-07-14T12:29:57","modified_gmt":"2016-07-14T10:29:57","slug":"20-year-old-windows-printer-flaw-exposes-you-to-malware","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/software\/171903-20-year-old-windows-printer-flaw-exposes-you-to-malware.html","title":{"rendered":"20-year-old Windows printer flaw exposes you to malware"},"content":{"rendered":"

Security researchers\u00a0from\u00a0Vectra Networks recently found<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0that the Windows Print Spooler does not properly authenticate printer drivers when you\u00a0install them from a remote location, Ars Technica reported<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The vulnerability is rooted in a\u00a0protocol called\u00a0Point-and-Print, which lets you automatically download a printer’s driver when you\u00a0connect to it for the first time over a network.<\/p>\n

Point-and-Print stores a shared driver on the printer or print server\u00a0so you don’t have to\u00a0find, download, and install it manually.<\/p>\n

Thanks to the vulnerability in the protocol,\u00a0any printer, print server, or networked device pretending to be a printer may be\u00a0used to deliver an exploit to unpatched Windows systems.<\/p>\n

Microsoft included\u00a0a fix\u00a0for the issue in a patch this week,\u00a0and in its advisory<\/a><\/strong> it rated the code-execution vulnerability critical for all supported Windows versions.<\/p>\n

Vectra said the vulnerability dates back to Windows 95.<\/p>\n

More on Windows<\/h3>\n

Windows Server 2016 launch details announced<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Windows 10 Enterprise subscription licence prices revealed<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

What the new Windows 10 Start Menu looks like<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

You won\u2019t miss this Windows 10 update notification<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vectra Networks has discovered an ancient vulnerability in Windows.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":110808,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[36,123,38057,807],"class_list":["post-171903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-software","tag-active","tag-microsoft","tag-vectra-networks","tag-windows"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171903"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171903"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171903\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":171935,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171903\/revisions\/171935"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}