New Bot Exploits Months-Old Symantec Bug

Symantec on Tuesday warned of a new bot exploiting multiple months-old bugs, including one in its own antivirus scanning engine, and said that it's collected evidence of an attack in progress.

The bot, dubbed Spybot.acyr, includes exploits for seven different vulnerabilities, including five already patched flaws in Microsoft Windows and one within Symantec's enterprise antivirus products. The Symantec bug was reported and patched in May.

Of the five Microsoft vulnerabilities leveraged by Spybot.acyr, the oldest harks to 2003, while the most recent was disclosed in August 2006. All have been patched.

"At the present time, we are seeing a spike in traffic on Port 2967 with activity only in the .edu domain," Symantec warned on its security research team's blog Tuesday. "[But] based on [our] intelligence, the impact of the attack is minimal thus far."

SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center also has tracked an increase in traffic on the same port, which is used by Symantec's AntiVirus Corporate Edition, and a back door for an exploit against unpatched systems.

Symantec recommended that users of its corporate antivirus software block port 2967 if they couldn't immediately patch the vulnerability.