There’s been quite a few Microsoft related exploits recently, but not in Windows, people have moved their focus towards the application layer and the top of the OSI stack.

This time it was a 0-day Vulnerability in Microsoft Word.

The original news comes from SANS Internet Storm Center Diary (ISC).

Microsoft has reported Word 2003, Word 2002, Word 2000 and Word Viewer 2003 are reportedly affected.

The vulnerability is being exploited in the wild, the malicious document is called QUESTION.DOC.

Password stealing Trojan spreads with this vulnerability, link to the McAfee PWS-Agent.g writeup.

US-CERT reported today that “Word fails to properly handle malformed data structures allowing memory corruption to occur”. This vulnerability is public CVE-2006-6456 now.

We all knew it was just a matter of time until the ‘thing’ was out.

PandaLabs has detected the appearance of 1Table.A, a malicious code that exploits a recently detected critical vulnerability in Microsoft Word, and which also affects versions of MS Office 2003 and XP.

Microsoft confirmed today the existence of this vulnerability and apparently is working on a hotfix.

This security problem allows the execution of code on affected systems and, more dangerously, allows the construction of malicious code which is indistinguishable at first glance from a normal Word file.

That’s more than enough to get 70%* of the people who use Microsoft Office to download and execute the file. If they open .BAT, .COM and .EXE, opening a .DOC is everyday work.

This attack is not limited to .DOC files, still, they will be the most used extension. It can take place with a .XLS file with an embedded Word document.

1Table.A – the new trojan – is detected by most of the antivirus software, however, user’s should have they’r eyes open until patch is released by Microsoft (even if they don’t consider it critical)

Source: NHS

* 80% of the statistics are made on the spot!

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