Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Confirms Excel Zero-Day Attack
Guglio writes "Eweek has a story about a new, undocumented Excel flaw that is being used in a targeted attack against an unnamed business. The latest zero-day attack comes just two days after Patch Tuesday (coincidence?) and less than a month after a very similar, 'super, super targeted attack' against business interests overseas. The back-to-back zero-day attacks closely resemble each other and suggest that well-organized criminals are conducting corporate espionage using critical flaws purchased from underground hackers."
Anyone have any clue what is under attack?
Well organized criminals conducting corporate espionage, complex software running international corporations, (hackers/crackers) slipping deviously bugged code into the works for their own nefarious purposes.
I don't need to RTFA, I can just wait for the movie.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
Just upgrade to Windows VISTA (when it's out) and Office 2007 (when it's out) and all of these silly security issues will go away....
Oh wait, didn't they say that when they released Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows 2003 Server, Office XP, & Office 2003? HMMMMMMM. This could be a pattern forming.
STFU & GBTW
"If Criminal orgs are purchasing exploits, why doesn't Microsoft? (it's not like the don't have the money!)"
Microsoft lets these exploits run free to keep the cattle in line. They need to keep people upgrading and buying the latest versions of their products to keep the cash flowing. If they released a well-written, stable, secure piece of software, what reason would people have to upgrade?
Yea, nice way to jump to conclusions. The idea that intellectuals can't be criminals is almost victorian. Or maybe they fell for the stereotype of the happy-go-lucky-non-malicious-but-intellectually-in qusitive hacker who could come up with an exploit, but never use it for EVIL.
Zero-day exploits do tend to suggest someone with specific goals, who has the resources to sit and come up with zero day exploits, and the foresight to target deployment to achieve a goal. It's not behaviour that we stereotypically associate with hackers, but there is no reason it couldn't be one person (or ten or a hundred).
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
It is not a popularity problem - it's a "our marketing and sales departments delegate everything to our engineering and security departments" problem.
I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress -J Adams
Everyone knows that you should not open attachments. Word is likely full of 1000s of exploitable holes. Excel too. Plus any other complex program.
:)
Yes, OpenOffice will be full of holes as well.
Not news.
As for attacking just after the patch cycle, it's unlikely to mean anything. If I wanted to take advantage of a vulnerability for as long as possible, I would attack two or three days before the patch cycle. That will give people a couple of days to work out what happened and report the issue to Microsoft. After some initial analysis and prioritisation, a developer will be assigned to fix it. By that time it will have missed the boat for this month's patch day. Not that I would do this though.
I'll probably be modded down for this...
In this instance, however, it is being hypothesized that an organized group is responsible. That's a centralized target; likely to yield more than one guy in his basement wearing shorts and a coffee-stained t-shirt, drinking coffee and jolt and living off old pizza.
So, to CERT (and their international counterparts) I say - "Go get 'em, boys!"
The thing is, to be a good hacker, you kinda have to spend a lot of time and energy on hacking. At the end of the day, it's probably easier and equally lucrative to just sell your exploits to other people rather than using them yourself. It's also a much safer route legally speaking because you aren't directly involved in the criminal act, you're just selling the tools.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
There is no reason why it should have to be that way. In other operating systems and offices, you can open documents to see what's in them without handing over control of the OS to someone. Why should we accept a world in which unsolicited communication is banned ? Why can't we allows businesses to expand my making contacts with new, previously unknown people ?
Of course, the problem is made worse by the fact that MS makes it so difficult not to run with administrator privileges.
No, actually it is not. The most damaging things money wise that can happen to your computer are all available as the user, because if the data is important, the user obviously has to be able to read it. Trashing C:\Windows can always be fixed with a re-install. Uploading outlook.pst and *.xls to some site in Hong Kong can never be undone.
If this is really targeted at a particular business, then the solution seems pretty simple: that business tells all their employees not to click on attachments from people they don't know, and whips up some software to filter out this stuff before it even gets to their users. If they're big enough to be an attractive target for extortion, they're presumably big enough to have an IT staff competent to take care of those simple steps.
No, that is not the solution. Having to spend more on IT is the PROBLEM THIS BUG CREATED, not the solution.
Like many computer users, windows or linux or mac, you have internalized your work-arounds and broken-system survival strategies to the point that you actually think that's the way things are supposed to work.
Anyone here thinking it's a coincidence that the exploit goes life JUST after "patch day"?
I don't want to call the responsible people at MS retards, who thought that patching at one very predetermined day every month is a good idea, but my English is not good enough to come up with a better name for this kind of idea.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If a hacker sold an exploit to someone who uses it for corporate espionage, isn't that using his intellectual ability for "evil" as you put it?
The hackers themselves are probably not commiting the corporate espionage. They are merely traders in "Security Tools". They are like arms deals who sell to warlords. So no the hackers probably do not pull of the corporate espionage they just develop the means to do it. Which is probably the smarter thing to do.
"Anything tastes good if you deep fry it."
I do not believe that e-mail spamming attack against a single company can be that effective.
Ever heard of Osirusoft? How about Blue Security more recently? A targeted spamming attack can be pretty damn effective.
Very low percentage of e-mail users, especially professionals, actually open the attachments in unsolicited e-mail.
This could not be the e-mail users I am used to working with. They'll open anything.
So you expect the "malicious code" to be well labeled in the XML stream?
Seriously you can only trap a narrow set of possible exploits this way (ones dealing with XML parser exploits generally). Scripts/macros/etc. would need to be interpreted to understand if was utilizing an exploit in the target product (assuming the vulnerability was known). Also the document can be a valid document but the organization and composition of elements in the document could be used to exploit a vulnerability.
I don't think it would net you as much of a benefit as you believe it would.
Bullcrap, an open format doesn't preclude security problems.
The closest already widespread format was PDF documents (multiple writers) and there have been plenty of exploits associated with that format, though not as many as Word, Excel, etc.
It's not like a document format designer was thinking one day, "I should make this contain executable code!"
After having to live through dozens of MS Office macro viruses before MS finally turned them off by default, I can tell you, that's exactly what MS developers thought. Fools.
You're missing the point. It's not that the hackers who find these exploits wouldn't use them - it's that they're smart enough NOT to use them. Undocumented exploits are worth their weight in gold for online criminals. Why use the exploit yourself and risk getting caught when you can sell it off to someone else for a tidy sum and let THEM risk getting caught.
Microsoft's fuckup is not in choosing to release their patches on a scheduled basis. They really had no choice in the matter. Their fuckup is in letting their security situation get so bad, they had to produce a large number of patches every month.
Of course, such a thing will never happen. Sooner or later the OSS community is going to catch up, they are going to come up with an Exchange killer, and they are going to come up with an accounting package to rival the likes of Platinum / Sage / AccPac for the SMB market, and then Microsoft is going to be in serious trouble. However until the OSS world gets the necessary applications to slay the dragon with, we're stuck with Microsoft for the forseeable future.