Microsoft Patches 18 Security Flaws in Windows, Office

[Brett_Tabke]

Microsoft Corp. today released seven security updates to address 18 separate flaws in its Windows operating systems and Office software, including 13 problems that earned a "critical" severity rating, the company's most dire.

Three of the patches mend flaws in Microsoft Office, including eight specific to Microsoft Excel. As Security Fix noted in recent posts, software blueprints showing would-be attackers just how to exploit two of these Excel flaws are already available online.

[blog.washingtonpost.com...]

Run your update - run your update now.

[truezeta]

Interesting...I am updating my computer now. However, it appears my computer at work has suffered damage from an unknown virus. Surfing the web and my computer shut-down automatically. After rebooting, everything seemed to function. Except for internet sites for Microsoft--MSN, MSNBC, Live, etc would not load and instead would show symbols. Any idea what kind of virus that could be? IT seemed to be stumped. My brother (IT geek) suggested they reimage my computer and hope I surf smarter (shrugs).

[netmeg]

Take a look at the hosts file in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\ and make sure that the microsoft and other addresses aren't redirected to somewhere else. You can view the file with Notepad.

Meanwhile, since I did my update, my Outlook 2003 looks different. Lines between each email message that weren't there before. I know they did *something* to Outlook, but I didn't think they were supposed to be changing the appearance.

[herb]

And, as important, you may want to ensure you have an udated version of Acrobat

Adobe on Monday issued a new version of Acrobat to fix what it called a "critical" security vulnerability in the program that hackers could use to hijack machines running the software just by convincing people to open a specially crafted PDF document.

This flaw is present in Acrobat versions 6.0.4 and earlier, for both Windows and MAC

[blog.washingtonpost.com...]

[wmuser]

Already did