Excel has definitely caught the attention of the hacker community. There is a new, third vulnerability in the spreadsheet product that still has no patch.
The attack takes advantage of Adobe’s Flash technology, which can be used to provide graphics and animation to Excel documents. “When the target user opens the Excel file, the [malicious] Flash code will execute automatically without user interaction,” the alert states.
This latest attack is worrisome because the code can be executed with little user interaction, said Juha-Matti Laurio, an independent security researcher based in Helsinki. “Embedding this type of objects to spreadsheets is not common, but it doesn’t matter, because the infection is caused just by opening the file,” he said.
Try OpenOffice today. 🙂
[tags]Excel, Microsoft, Exploit, Vulnerability, OpenOffice[/tags]