04.05.09
There is Life After Conficker: Critical Microsoft Office Vulnerabilities
Expensive office suites leave one’s bank account exposed to malice
Summary: Microsoft Office users are left critically vulnerable and no solution exists to prevent attacks
Conficker is far from gone, but the ‘vulnerabilities treadmill’ marches on. Another unpatched Microsoft Office vulnerability is already being exploited and Microsoft admits this. It is the same old and familiar routine, but Microsoft brought this vulnerability even to Apple Macs.
Microsoft has warned of a vulnerability in their PowerPoint application that can be exploited with a specially crafted presentation file to allow remote execution of code. According to the report, the vulnerability is caused by an invalid object in memory and affects Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2000 Service Pack 3, 2002 Service Pack 3, 2003 Service Pack 3 and Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac. Other versions are reportedly not affected.
More coverage in:
- Attackers pounce on Microsoft PowerPoint zero-day
- Attackers exploit critical PowerPoint vulnerability
- Microsoft Warns of Attacks on PowerPoint Vulnerability
It would probably be more forgivable had it been patched on time, not been such a frequent occurrence, and Windows leadership not said that Microsoft products “just aren’t engineered for security.”
For a secure, free, and standards-compliant office suite, GNU/Linux is recommended because it comes preloaded with one (or several). █
Yggdrasil said,
April 5, 2009 at 7:42 pm
It’s important for readers to note that the first article link provided is already old. April 1st, 5 days old now. But why did Roy use this? Because the article paints a very bad picture. It’s got a scary headline, “It’s worse than we thought!” and uses a large, though unproven number of 10 million. It’s not uncommon for news media to try and scare readers. After all, playing on fears is a great way to ensure people read the articles and advertisers get the viewers.
It would have been better to use something more recent, like this: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/03/conficker_zombie_count/
“Conficker zombie botnet drops to 3.5 million” – amazing what a difference a few days makes when it comes to more accurate news reporting.
However, this article doesn’t make Microsoft look as bad, so Roy will quickly dismiss this article. It’s not fit for BoycottNovell. He is only interested in the worst of the worst. Readers however, would be interested in being given more recent and accurate information.