MS Word Zero-Day Exploit Found

subbers writes "A zero-day flaw in Microsoft Word program is being used in an active exploit by sophisticated hackers in China and Taiwan, according to warnings from anti-virus researchers. The exploit arrives as an ordinary Microsoft Word document attachment to an e-mail and drops a backdoor with rootkit features when the document is opened and the previously unknown vulnerability is triggered. From the article: 'The e-mail was written to look like an internal e-mail, including signature. It was addressed by name to the intended victim and not detected by the anti-virus software.'"

Comments

Re:Not overly bad, combined with some others bad.

[Jimmy King]

You haven't done any computer support for non-technical people in a long time, have you? It's only been a couple years since I broke free from the shackles of technical support, so believe me when I say way too many people will open this without thinking twice.

Re:Question

[Fat Idiot]

Zero Day means that the vulnerability was previously unknown. Hence there are no days between dicovery of the vuln and dicovery of the exploit in the wild.

Re:Question

[MarkByers]

Hmm the Wikipedia page doesn't really explain it very well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_day so let me try.

It means that the exploit was discovered by crackers before any patch has been made available to the public. In other words there is nothing you can do except not open any .doc files unless you want to run the risk of being cracked.

But of course, everyone knows that Word is full of holes because no-one has really attempted to use it as an attack vector yet since there are many easier ways.

WordPad

[Nom du Keyboard]

Open your .doc documents in WordPad. The nice thing about it, aside from it being free and included in all flavors of Windows, is that it's too stupid to do any of the fancy stuff. It has long been a favorite to avoid macro viruses for the same reason.