September 5, 2006 7:59 AM PDT
Word flaw hit with zero-day attack
By
Dawn Kawamoto
Staff Writer, CNET News
An "extremely critical flaw" in Microsoft Word 2000 is currently being exploited by malicious attackers, which could lead to remote execution of code on a user's system, security researcher Secunia advised Tuesday.
The vulnerability affects systems running Windows 2000 and occurs when processing malicious Word 2000 documents, according to Secunia's security advisory.
Security company Symantec, which several days ago detected the exploit, Trojan MDropper.Q, noted that it uses a two-step attack.
Trojan MDropper.Q exploits the Microsoft Word vulnerability to drop another file, a new variant of Backdoor.Femo, according to a security advisory by Symantec.
"As with other recent (Microsoft) Office vulnerabilities, documents incorporating the exploit code must be opened with a vulnerable copy of Microsoft Word 2000 for it to work," Symantec's advisory stated. "As such, it makes the vulnerability unsuitable for the creation of self-replicating network worms."
Microsoft has not yet issued a patch for the vulnerability, and users are advised to forgo opening untrusted documents.
This latest exploit of an Office vulnerability follows on the heels of a similar malicious attack in June. In that particular case, users' systems would become infected when opening a malicious Excel document called "okN.xls." That malicious file contained the Trojan horse Mdropper.J, which then dropped the Booli.A program on a user's system. Booli.A would then download more malicious files to the user's PC.
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a.) You have to be running Word2k on a Win2k box
b.) You have to open a "malicious" word document
c.) It is not really a virus, but a backdoor allowing (probably) remote access to your PC
I don't know about you guys, but I don't make it a habit of opening random word documents off the internet that reek of malicious intent. But hey, if you DO decide to open that "10 ways to increase your potency in bed" document off of limewire, or that atachment in your e-mail inbox from LonleyWife, or HotMilf, then you deserve to have your computer infected.
I know this doesn't excuse the fact that there is a security flaw, but software development is an imperfect art. Anybody who thinks otherwise has never, ever coded a single line of code and compiled it.
Sure there is a need for some to use more powerful document editors, but most people don't need it. We use WordPerfect in my office, but the truth is for most of them here Wordpad would be fine. We would probably use Word, but WordPerfect works great, does all we need, and cost less than Microsoft Office. We could use OpenOffice, but we don't.
If you own Word or WordPerfect and all you do is type then you wasted your money. Next time download OpenOffice or just use wordpad.
As far a security goes I just say keep or AV upto date and your firewall active. All software has flaws, even open source ones.
This is the problem. If it was a word processor, there would be no way to execute code on it. But, since the company that put it out (we all know who that is) decides in their wisdom that their word processor should actually be some kind of high level programming language (in addition to a word processor), we get problems like this. Other companies have jumped on the bandwagon too, and now you have a hard time finding a simple ordinary word processing program. Even if you did, it wouldn't be able to open the letter you just got from your mom because she used one of the bloated popular programs.
This is why the software in question will never be installed on my computer. How in the world can anyone, and I mean ANYONE, justify a WORDPROCESSOR being a security risk?
This is one of the MANY reasons why I have to HOLD MY NOSE while I'm using my PC.
I'm really hoping, before I die, to see Linux with some kind of directx emulator or something. If that happened, I'd drop MS and NEVER BUY ANOTHER ONE OF THEIR PRODUCTS EVER.
Fat Chance.
* Read a bit (not only on M$ fansites)
* Talk to normal people (end users) about their problems to learn their needs
* Talk to people from small companies to learn their needs
* Talk to people from internationals to learn their needs
* Learn C/C++ and see what it can do with little resources and compare it with the same in .NET or VB
* Test a lot (Try for instance a good linux distro, perhaps Gentoo? Or Borrow an old MAC (8 years old and still running, or something like that))
Combine the things you learned with an open mind, and then come back with a funded reply. I saw your name in countless ridiculous comments in the last weeks. I just can tell you 1 thing: you know jack **** about PC's
(or a formal) standard. If you want anyone to be able to read
your document, then it has to be a .doc.
you could write it as a .pdf feature, if you had that capability (I
have it on my mac, but I dont know about PC users who dont
use MS Office). Thats pretty universal too.
If all office suites could gurantee formatting on all machines with
all word processors, then Word would loose its monopoly. Its
true that most of the features are irrelevent to most of the users
and many are getting fed up of paying for bells and whistles that
they neither want nor need. Not to mention the fact that the
application grows every time an upgrade is done.
I have Neo Office and MS Office. I try to use Neo Office whenever
possible, but sometimes, I need to have gurantees about
formatting so I use MS Office. With the rise of the open
document format, I think that my copy of MS Office will be
retiring and I will be freeing up a large chunk of disk space!
<firstname>: Microsoft
<lastname>: Word
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http://www.whotohate.com
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September 7, 2006 6:28 PM PDT
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