Powerpoint vulnerability (August 2006)
I’m having to make sure I put the date in the title of these posts now…. over the weekend there were rumors of a new powerpoint vulnerability. Sans had an early notice of some trojan droppers using powerpoint files. And by the 20th (Sunday) it was being called a 0-day. There is a good FAQ over at securiteam.com.
It sounds kind of like what you’d expect… “specially crafted Powerpoint file leads to code execution.” There’s no details of which versions of Powerpoint, but I wonder if it may go back to the Office 97 era Powerpoint since the affected operating systems in the FAQ go back to Windows 95 (Was it possible to load Powerpoint 2000 on Windows 95… I guess it may have been.) There doesn’t yet seem to be any word from Microsoft on the issue. The bottom line here is to be cautious with files downloaded from unkown/unexpected and untrusted sources.
Update 8/24/06
According to Microsoft via betanews this is NOT a zero-day exploit and is an issue that’s already been fixed. In other words, if you’re up to date on your office updates you should be ok.