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MS Office sees 2 flaws a month...

...and that’s only so far this year. Apparently, people are using a lot of “buzzer” programs to find flaws. It took MS four months to respond to the flaw exposed by an attempted eBay auction of the details, and that’s apparently a normal response time for them.

As well as MS-Office, many web tools, iTunes & much security software has been ‘hit’ this year. I suspect that flaws in core, seldom-updated and internal chunks of software would be more disconcerting for security people.

This looks to me like a fine time to recommend using OpenOffice instead. (-:

Comments

Leon RJ Brooks said…
Sorry, forgot to mention: here is a reliable Oz download site for OpenOffice.
24 July, 2006 10:31
Anonymous said…
I have a suspicion that many are now ignoring the operating systems and concentrating on the typical installed applications ie any version of an office app, virus scanners,security apps etc
24 July, 2006 19:06
Leon RJ Brooks said…
That's distinctly probable (for this batch, anyway), but then again their tricks will be addressed at the most common suites, which is not (yet) OpenOffice — and when it begins to become OOo, the malware authors will be particularly aiming for the Vista versions.

Linux versions of OOo will see more regular updates, as well (ie through their automatable package management), which will thwart malware authors both directly and by giving them a more erratic moving target to aim for instead of a static one.
24 July, 2006 19:29
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