It’s pointing to increased activity on TCP Port 445. An increase in “sniffing” activity on a port associated with a recently patched Microsoft Corp. vulnerability may be the signal of an impending attack attempting to exploit the flaw, according to an alert from analyst firm Gartner Inc. The flaw in question is a remote code execution vulnerability associated with the Microsoft Windows Server Message Block (SMB) Protocol. It was rated as critical by the company in its June security bulletin, released earlier this month, because attackers who exploit it could take complete control of affected systems, according to Microsoft. Full Story