Viruses/Worms News

Adobe Flash flaw exploited by malware in Microsoft Excel files

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Security flaws that exist in Adobe Flash are being actively exploited by cybercriminals via maliciously crafted Microsoft Excel files, according to web security researchers at security firm Sophos.

Researchers last month discovered exploits of a Flash vulnerability that could infect PCs with Trojan malware upon opening a malicious Adobe Acrobat PDF file, which caused Adobe to rush a security updates for Flash Player, Acrobat and Reader.

Now Sophos says the malware authors have changed their approach with malware embedded in Microsoft Excel and Sophos expects to see exploits in PowerPoint and Word as well, the SophosLabs blog reported.

"It was only a matter of time before the [antivirus firms] caught up and started blocking suspicious PDFs and so the game has moved onto finding other compound files capable of embedding and invoking Flash objects," Sophos said in the blog.

Flash has also been exploited through malware in multimedia files embedded in websites, according to Paul Royal, principal researcher at Purewire, PCWorld reported.

Sophos recommended disabling Flash until the flaw is fixed and warns that users should never open attachments from unknown sources.