14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has published Security Advisor 925984 in which it confirms that it is investigating zero-day attacks targeting a vulnerability in Microsoft PowerPoint 2000, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002, Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2003, Microsoft PowerPoint 2004 for Mac, and Microsoft PowerPoint v. X for Mac.
"It's been a bad few weeks for Microsoft on the security front. No sooner have they rushed to deal with a day zero vulnerability in the way their products handle Vector Markup Language than they discover an apparent problem with PowerPoint files," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "Hackers are showing increasing ingenuity in their attempts to break into innocent users' computers, and are hunting for bugs in commonly-used programs to exploit. PowerPoint is the standard business tool for presentations, underlining that all computer users need to be show great caution when handling unsolicited email attachments."
The Redmond Company has stated that the vulnerability can exclusively be exploited by the opening of a malicious PowerPoint file. Additionally, the US software giant has updated Windows Live OneCare safety scanner to address the malware associated with the new PowerPoint vulnerability exploits.