Thursday, September 16, 2004

Problems with JPG images

Microsoft has released its monthly batch of security updates and there's some that affect Office as well as Windows generally.
It is yet another buffer overrun problem where, in this case, a JPG image could be rigged to run malicious code on your computer. All you'd have to do is display such a JPG image on a vulnerable computer and the code would run - ouch.
To protect against this problem you have to make sure that Windows itself is updated AND Microsoft Office AND any other program that can display JPG images.
Microsoft's full bulletin is at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/MS04-028.mspx
BTW some anti-virus products like McAfee and TrendMicro will detect this exploit.