McAfee, Inc. - Threat Center

Global Threat Condition

July 20, 2010: McAfee Labs has raised the Global Threat Condition to 'Severe' based on in-the-wild exploitation of an unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft Windows (CVE-2010-2568 - Vulnerability in Windows Shell Could Allow Remote Code Execution)

Critical

Systems worldwide are being widely targeted, or may become widely targeted by an active and available exploit or threat. An extreme global security incident is taking or may imminently take place.

Severe

An unpatched or recently patched vulnerability can be exploited by a worm, and systems worldwide are at risk to be targeted by a particular worm. No worm activity has been identified.

A high incidence of new malware that potentially can cause damage has been reported.

Elevated

An unpatched or recently patched vulnerability is present on many systems worldwide but requires user interaction to be exploited.

An existing vulnerability becomes more serious because new exploit code has been published.

There is new malware activity, but it is not widespread.

Low

There is no direct threat to systems that have been patched.

No new significant malware activity has been reported.