A Particularly Nasty Week For Malware
This is turning into quite a week for computer security. Microsoft issued a rare out of band security alert concerning Excel; BusinessWeek’s home page has been the victim of a hack and more than 400 banks are the targets of a new Trojan. If that wasn’t enough, the one year anniversary of the Storm worm is approaching, with the associated Trojan (define) looking to rear its ugly head again. Plus, Apple today issued its own set of fixes for QuickTime.
First up was the Microsoft alert, something the company rarely does outside of Patch Tuesday unless the threat is severe. It issued an alert late on Tuesday that older versions of Excel, from Excel 2000 to Excel 2003 with Service Pack 2, are affected by a vulnerability. People who open a malicious e-mail attachment or visit a Web site hosting malicious code may find that their systems are compromised and remote code is executed on their system. Microsoft said that so far the exploit is not being used widely, but for "specific targeted attacks" and it is investigating further. A Particularly Nasty Week For Malware