On the other hand, Horley also admits that on the wireless side, “the greatest risk of being affected is when joining an open network. Assuming the machine is on a trusted, secure wireless network, unless it is ‘owned’ there is no reason someone would run this exploit unless they were being malicious.” He also notes: “There are likely far better exploits out there then a simple DOS attack if you have managed to connect to the secure wireless network.”

Meanwhile Bowne is continuing to push Microsoft to take three actions: issue a security warning telling people to disable router discovery on servers and adjust their firewall to block rogue Router Advertisements on clients; shut Router Discovery off by default in future products; and patch the network software so that it limits the amount of CPU that can be consumed by the Router Discovery and Stateless Autoconfiguration processes.

Julie Bort writes the Microsoft Update, Odds and Ends and Source Seeker blogs for Network World's Microsoft Subnet, Cisco Subnet and Open Source Subnet community sites. Follow Bort on Twitter@Julie188.

in Network World's LAN & WAN section.