Go ahead and poo poo the overdone marketing of the Badlock vulnerability. With its fire-engine-red logo and a dedicated website that went live more than a month before the release of any patches, claims the risk was shamelessly hyped are justified.

That said, Badlock represents a real and critical threat to virtually any organization that maintains a Microsoft network. Administrators who don't patch right away fail to do so at their own peril. In a nutshell, Badlock refers to a defect in a security component contained in just about every version of the Windows and Linux operating systems.

Security researchers have discovered a nasty security vulnerability that is said to affect almost every version of Windows and Samba, the Samba development team announced Tuesday.

So, Save the Date if you are a Windows or Samba file server administrator. Samba is a free, open source implementation of the SMB/CIFS network file sharing protocol that runs on the majority of operating systems available today, including Windows, UNIX, Linux, IBM System 390, and OpenVMS. Dubbed Badlock, the vulnerability has been discovered by Stefan Metzmacher, a developer of Samba Core Team.