• 0day exploit in Excel

    Posted on June 16, 2006 at 00:52 CDT by • Comment in the Forums

    A few hours ago, Mike Reavey at the Microsoft Security Response Center blogged a warning about a new hole in Excel.

    In what appears to be a new pattern, now that Microsoft is charging for protection against flaws in its own products, Reavey writes:

    We’ve activated our security response process and we have added detection to the Windows Live Safety Center today for up-to-date removal of malicious software that attempts to exploit the vulnerability… We’re also actively sharing that information with our Microsoft Security Response Alliance partners so that their detection can be up to date to detect and remove attacks. We’ve got the Office team engaged of course and they are hard at work investigating the vulnerability.

    Permit me to translate that into English for you. If you pay Microsoft fifty bucks, you get protection now. Wait a day and you’ll get protection from the other antivirus vendors. Wait a month or two, and Microsoft will finally patch Excel for free.

    Something is terribly wrong here.

    UPDATE: Secunia calls this hole extremely critical, its most dire rating.

    Symantec’s Security Response center has a few details.

    Apparently there’s at least one in-the-wild exploit, which comes in the form of an Excel spreadsheet called okN.xls attached to a spoofed email. Symantec considers it to be a “very low” threat.

    It looks like all of the major antivirus firms have posted (or are in the process of posting) updates for this hole.

    Office Patches/Security
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