Exploits a plenty – IE / Excel (Firefox?)
There are a number of vulnerabilities that are currently unpatched, but have working publicly known exploits for Excel (*2) and Internet Explorer (2 vulnerabilities here as well.) Proof of Concept code has been released for both the Excel and Internet Explorer vulnerabilities. This means, with the code publicly available, it won’t be long before it’s bundled into other malware delivery structures…. You might look at alternative browsers, BUT…. be forewarned that one of these vulnerabilities appears to work on a fully patched install of Mozilla-Firefox. (According to Sans – the Secunia code doesn’t – but the full disclosure exploit code does affect Firefox.) I’ve seen word of early 1.5.0.5 builds being available – I wonder if that will be modified to fix this issue?
The Excel flaws have been talked about for a while, code is now available which ratchets up the concern around those. For web browsing – it might be worthwhile to consider browsers other than IE unless absolutely necessary. Yes, firefox is affected by one of these, but time to patch has typically been shorter for browsers OTHER than IE.
Avoid clicking links in unexpected emails/attachments in unexpected emails. It’s all a matter of trust….
For IE users – you might protect yourself by running as a limited user or one of the various programs that will let IE drop priviliges. Sandboxie.com might be one possibility for you.
–UPDATE — 6/30/06 –
It appears that Firefox IS NOT VULNERABLE to the above vulnerabilities. According to SANS there had been some initial concern that one of these vulnerability exploits also worked with Firefox. Further investigation has turned that out to be false. There’s also a brief comment at a mozillazine.org weblog on the issue (referring to the SANS post.)
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