Careful With Word Documents!

Security... yes, indeed, security, that's the keyword of the day. It's not the fact that I've been fighting a Trojan horse for a few hours today, just to finish - as a winner, fortunately - a battle I started yesterday, but that Microsoft announced everyone to be very careful when working with Word documents, because nasty things may happen...


In this security advisory, Microsoft wrote they are currently "investigating new public reports of very limited, targeted attacks using a vulnerability in the Microsoft Jet Database Engine that can be exploited through Microsoft Word", but the worst part of the deal is that, if successfull, the attacker "could gain the same user rights as the local user. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less affected than users who operate with administrative user rights".

Most Windows versions are vulnerable, and while currently Microsoft is investigating an exploit for Word, other documents could also be used to carry on attacks, so if you're not running Vista or Windows Server 2003 SP2, your Word 2007, 2003, 2002, or 2000 may be the path for malicious code to enter your computer.

These being said, until Microsoft releases a patch to the problem, be sure only to work with documents from reliable sources, so check and double check every document you're using, because the time you may think to lose now won't be wasted on trying to get your PC back on its feet, later...