The forces of evil have produced a devilish tool whereby spam can be sent to thousands of Windows users in minutes, in the guise of system alerts. This was brought to our attention by reader Mike MacNeill, who sent us a screenie of a Windows system alert offering him the university diploma of his dreams with "no required tests, classes, books or interviews," in the classic manner.
The scam is the brainchild of an outfit called DirectAdvertiser, and leverages the Windows RPC (Remote Procedure Call) function. I downloaded the demo version and played around for a while. My results may not be entirely accurate because I didn't use the full, $700 version, and because I used it on my own network behind a firewall. However, running Ethereal on the box and trying it out revealed packets destined for ports 135 (DCE/RPC), 137 (NetBIOS name service) and 138 (NetBIOS UDP) on the target.
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