Masquerading through the enterprise!

by Guy Huntington | October 17, 2006 at 02:07 pm | 339 views | add comment | 0 recommendations

A Microsoft employee published a blog on Thursday October 12 stating

I wanted to let you know that weâve been made aware of proof of concept code published publicly affecting Microsoft Office 2003 PowerPoint. We are currently investigating this report. The reported proof of concept may allow an attacker to execute code on a userâs machine by convincing them to open a specially-crafted PowerPoint file.

Enterprises should be aware that an email with a PowerPoint document attached containing the malware will fly underneath the current firewall and anti-virus defenses. This means that criminals can use this method to obtain ids and passwords and then masquerade as the user.

Beyond waiting nervously for a fix from Microsoft and then from the antivrus vendors, a better strategy is to have a multi-layered enterprise identity strategy.

You must assume that your outer defenses will be breached, that ids and passwords will be captured and thus plan your defenses accordingly. My paper "Battling Botnets and Rootkits - A Layered Identity Strategy" speaks directly to this.

Guy Huntington
www.authenticationworld.com
guy.huntington@authenticationworld.com