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Microsoft says hackers seek to attack PowerPoint users
- From: Brian Warkoczeski
- Date: Tue May 12 16:41:10 2009
Microsoft says hackers seek to attack PowerPoint users
May 12, 2009
www.yahoo.com
BOSTON (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp said on Tuesday that hackers are
seeking to attack users of its PowerPoint presentation software for
Windows PCs and released patches to protect them against the threat.
The world's No. 1 software maker said that a version of PowerPoint for
Apple Inc's Mac computers is also vulnerable, though it has yet to find
any evidence that hackers are actively seeking to exploit it.
Microsoft defined the threat as "critical" -- the most severe on the
scale by which it ranks vulnerabilities to its software.
Hackers are seeking to exploit the vulnerability in PowerPoint by
persuading the intended victim to open a tainted PowerPoint file -- that
they either download from a Website or receive in an email, according to
Symantec Corp, the world's top maker of security software.
"At that point, the attacker would then have complete control over
everything the user's account has permission to do on the system," said
Alfred Huger, a senior researcher with Symantec.
Huger said that Symantec has so far only observed a limited number of
hacker attempts to exploit the vulnerability in PowerPoint.
Microsoft did not release a patch for Mac computers, though company
spokesman Christopher Budd said that one is in development.
(Reporting by Jim Finkle; Editing Bernard Orr)
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