A new zero day is making the rounds. Microsoft announced on Friday that ne’er do wells are exploiting a problem with shortcut files that affects Windows XP SP2. No surprise that this is a version of XP that Microsoft recently dropped support for.
From Computer World:
In a security advisory, Microsoft confirmed what other researchers had been saying for almost a month: Hackers have been exploiting a bug in Windows “shortcut” files, the placeholders typically dropped on the desktop or into the Start menu to represent links to actual files or programs.
“In the wild, this vulnerability has been found operating in conjunction with the Stuxnet malware,” Dave Forstrom, a director in Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group, said in a post Friday to a company blog.
The long and the short of it is that you should really keep your software current. And while you’re at it upgrade that Windows NT box that’s still on your network running the software that some summer intern wrote. You know which one.
(Image used under CC from Dubwise Version)
