Technical Tidbits™

I just received one of my newsletters and it pointed me to an article at InfoWorld disclosing that Microsoft confesses to posting a flawed update. (Imagine that!) Perhaps they’ve been spending too much time courting Jerry Seinfeld?

Anyway, the article’s subheading states:

The admission was the third time in the past two months that Microsoft has had to re-issue a security-related update

The reason I’ve put this in the alerts category is because the security update was marked critical and the re-release is critical.

You can read more about the re-release here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS08-051.mspx

and read the full InfoWorld Article here: Microsoft confesses…

As a side note, the critical update states:

“This security update resolves three privately reported vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office PowerPoint and Microsoft Office PowerPoint Viewer that could allow remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted PowerPoint file. An attacker who successfully exploited any of these vulnerabilities could take complete control of an affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.”

That made me think about all the Power Point attachments I’ve been getting in my e-mails lately. (Which I don’t open, btw.) Wonder how many of you are being controlled remotely since you’ve opened them?

Sort of makes you wonder……