Culture Jamming

[XLS files]

FYI...

- http://blog.trendmicro.com/olympic-fans-may-fall-for-unpatched-ms-excel-vuln/
March 9, 2008 - "XLS files specially designed to exploit a currently unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft Excel (identified as CVE-2008-0081) are reportedly being sent as email attachments in the wild. The attachments, which arrive either as OLYMPIC.XLS or SCHEDULE.XLS are capable of dropping and executing Windows binary executables. This Trojan also drops a non-malicious Excel file and opens it upon execution to trick the user that it is the attached Excel file... Both OLYMPIC.XLS and SCHEDULE.XLS are observed to use similar exploit templates and even allow malware writers to customize the exploit to perform other routines... malware authors are using this window of opportunity to infect a large number of computers. More information on this exploit can be found on this Microsoft Security Advisory*. Trend Micro advises users to be wary of opening unsolicited email messages, much more of files attached to them..."

(Screenshots available at the URL above.)

* http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/947563.mspx
January 16, 2008

- http://nvd.nist.gov/nvd.cfm?cvename=CVE-2008-0081
Last revised: 1/17/2008

 

[Active exploitation of Excel vuln]

FYI...

Active exploitation of Excel vuln
- http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=4117
Last Updated: 2008-03-10 23:52:52 UTC - "...We can confirm these attacks and have been tracking several exploits over the last few days. It should be noted that the incidents we are aware of have been limited to a very specific targeted attack and were not widespread. In total, we established approximately 21 reports of attacks using only 8 different files, from within the same two communities, so far... some of the signatures we know of that catch iterations of these attacks. Note that some are relatively generic and catch multiple other exploits as well... Trojan-Dropper.MSExcel.Agent ...We are aware that some of the samples connect back to update-microsoft.kmip.net (221.130.180.87) on port 80, to retrieve the IP address of the actual control server."

> http://www.us-cert.gov/current/#trojan_exploiting_microsoft_excel_vulnerability

 

[Microsoft Security Advisory (947563)]

FYI...

Microsoft Security Advisory (947563)
Vulnerability in Microsoft Excel Could Allow Remote Code Execution
- http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/947563.mspx
Updated: March 11, 2008 - "...We have issued MS08-014* to address this issue..."
* http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS08-014.mspx