Free tools help protect users from IIS zero-day exploit

19.05.2009
Security and patch management vendor Shavlik Technologies Tuesday recommended a pair of free tools from to help users protect themselves from a in Internet Information Server.

Eric Schultze, CTO of Shavlik, says the and the , both available for free from Microsoft, will provide protection for users until Microsoft decides if it will release a formal patch.

Microsoft has not promised a patch. The company's next Patch Tuesday release is slated for June 9.

URLScan v3.1 is an ISAPI filter that reads configuration from an Urlscan.ini file and restricts certain types of HTTP requests from being executed by IIS, according to Microsoft's Web site. The tool installs on IIS 5.1 and later.

The IIS Lockdown Tool can be used on IIS 5.0. The 6.0 and 7.0 versions of IIS have similar built-in security configuration tools and users don't need to run the Lockdown tool on Web servers running those IIS versions.

Schultze says the zero-day flaw appears to be more serious in IIS 5.0 on Windows 2000 because the vulnerable WebDAV services are running by default. He points out that IIS 6.0 on Windows Server 2003 doesn't enable WebDAV by default.