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Word Files Increasingly Targeted In April
David Utter
Staff Writer
2007-05-21
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Single email attacks have been used with greater frequency as criminal spammers attempt to evade detection of mass mailing efforts.
If a junk message arrived in an inbox in April as a computer threat, there is a good chance it contained a virus. Security firm MessageLabs said 64 percent of the attacks they detected in April 2007 attempted to attack a newly patched flaw in Word.
The flaw in Word had been patched in June 2006. It involved an exploit opportunity available through Word's SmartTag feature.
"There were only 4 attacks and 4 emails last month, compared to 66 attacks and 273 emails this month," MessageLabs said in its report.
They also speculated on the abrupt rise in attacking a flaw that has had a patch available for nearly a year. It could be the work of one criminal group or many; also, a program that generates exploit-ready documents for this flaw could be in use.
Though an analysis by MessageLabs indicates 66 attacks were sent by not more than 27 groups, they could have been the result of efforts by a single group doing all of them.
Attacks are not being mass-mailed out, as a rule. Instead, spammers have been forced to resort to single user messages, lest their spam be noticed as a bulk mailing attempt and rejected by antispam measures.
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Tags: Email, Spam, Security, Microsoft Word
About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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