A Man and his Penguin

  In a security advisory posted online,
Microsoft said it was investigating reports of "limited ‘zero day’
attacks" that exploited a vulnerability in its PowerPoint 2000,
PowerPoint 2003, PowerPoint 2004 for Mac and PowerPoint v.X for Mac.

"Microsoft is developing a security update for PowerPoint that addresses this vulnerability," the advisory said.

Any attack could grant the attacker the same system usage rights as
the local user, Microsoft said. The vulnerability could be exploited by
corrupting system memory to run arbitrary code, the advisory said.

Microsoft cautioned users against opening documents sent by untrusted sources.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at security group
Sofos, said Microsoft had experienced "a bad few weeks on the security
front".

"No sooner have they rushed to deal with a day zero vulnerability in
the way their products handle Vector Markup Language than they discover
an apparent problem with PowerPoint files," he said.

But I don’t have to worry about it, as OpenOffice.org does not have this bug; and I doubt an open-source developer would let these kinds of security problems get past TWO development teams! Also, Linux users don’t "run as root" (use the administration account on their computer) like Windows users do, so if a similar problem existed on Linux, the attacker would still only be able to access what a limited account user can.

Although I don’t have to worry about staying up-to-date with the latest computing news, I *do* have to keep up-to-date anyway so I can add these articles to my blog