New ‘highly critical’ Office flaw embarrasses Microsoft
Wednesday, April 13, 2005 - 02:00 PM EDT"A day after monthly patch day, Microsoft has confirmed it is investigating an unpatched security hole in Office that could allow system access. The vulnerability has been labelled 'highly critical' by security firm Secunia. It exists in Microsoft's Jet Database Engine, and can be exploited to execute arbitrary code by tricking users into opening a specially designed '.mdb' file in Microsoft Access, according to Secunia. Exploit code for the vulnerability has already been posted to a public mailing list, the security company has warned," Scarlet Pruitt writes for IDG News Service. "Microsoft criticised disclosure of the vulnerability, saying that the commonly accepted practice is to report a threat to the vendor first so a patch can be developed if necessary before the exploit code gets distributed."
Full article and linkto the advisory here.
MacDailyNews Take: Another day, another exploit in Windowsland. Some thing never change.
We used the word "embarrasses" from the original article's headline because it made us laugh; having tried to use their software, we seriously doubt Microsoft ever had any capacity for embarrassment.
For our Windows-only friends, there is a better way, so for more information about smoothly adding a safe, secure, powerful, and fun Mac OS X machine to your computing arsenal, please click here. If we may be so forward, you might want to take a look at Apple's new Mac Mini which starts at just US$499 — it just might be the perfect machine for you. And don't forget to bump the RAM up to 512MB, you'll want it.
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Whew...thank god there was only one...