serious
Serious - Well, I guess I wasn’t the only one who saw the nasty implications in the latest round of bugs. The FBI is alerting people to be extra careful. And siliconvalley.com reports that Dept. of Defense was in on the action too. I find it comforting that the FBI is taking seriously these issues now. However, I still think the proposed solutions are not even close to being adequate. You can post patches and urge people to shut off features on their machines all you want. The hard part is getting people to actually respond. Code Red was reported on CNN, and hardly anyone patched their systems. We need a way to force people to either secure their systems or get quarantined from the network. In the case of UPnP, I suppose it would be easy enough for the FBI to get the major backbone providers to just block the traffic and solve the problem there. But this is just one bug; how about Red Hat bugs? We need a systemic fix.
The FBI didn’t say how to disable UPnP on affected XP machines. The way I did it on my machine was to run a command prompt (cmd.exe) and execute the following four commands. Maybe it will work on yours..
net stop “Universal Plug and Play Device Host”
net stop “SSDP Discovery Service”
wmic /node:localhost service where caption=”Universal Plug and Play Device Host” call ChangeStartMode “Disabled”
wmic /node:localhost service where caption=”SSDP Discovery Service” call ChangeStartMode “Disabled”