- TechRepublic

Microsoft released a patch this week for a critical vulnerability. The catch: this vulnerability has been known since 2000, and it’s a bug in a service active on almost every MS Windows system in the world. How safe do you feel?

Microsoft Windows systems use the Server Message Block application level network protocol to provide sharing capabilities for files, printers, and other resources. SMB is supported on many other operating systems, primarily by way of the open source Samba project, but most of the time non-Microsoft OSes use SMB only when they must be integrated into a network that also includes MS Windows systems.