Fighting malware and spam

Patch Tuesday leaves Word open to attack

Old and new zero-day vulnerabilities to remain unpatched.

Microsoft's monthly Patch Tuesday update release sees seven security patches for Windows operating systems and products, three of which are marked as critical. These include fixes for Visual Studio, Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player, the last of which, a fix for the .ASX and .ASF handling vulnerability which has been subject of some debate in recent days, was added to the set of updates previously scheduled for yesterday's release.

Fixes for the Word vulnerability revealed last week, along with another which has emerged in the last few days, are not included in the list despite exploits being known to exist for the flaws.

The earlier Word vulnerability has been recorded under a Microsoft Security Advisory, which can be found here, while the second is so far only mentioned in a Security Response Center blog entry, here (a Secunia alert is here). The new attack is thought to affect Word 2000, Word 2002, Word 2003 and Word 2003 Viewer, with older versions and Word 2007 not subject to the vulnerability. Both are thought to be in the wild, with so far only 'limited and targeted attacks' logged by security watchers.

'Microsoft's advice to minimise the danger of attack is to follow standard safe computing precautions, take care when receiving documents from unknown or unexpected sources, run up-to-date anti-virus software and ensure all the latest official security patches are applied,' said John Hawes, Technical Consultant at Virus Bulletin. 'At least one of these steps will provide little protection from the current Word threats. Let's hope Microsoft will once again break their monthly cycle, and get the products their users are running patched up and secured as soon as possible.'

Full details of the December patches are available in the Microsoft Security Bulletin, here.

13 December 2006

Tags: virus