Does your office practice proper maintenance and security against the latest threats, like Sandworm and CryptoWall 2.0? You should, or else your business might get a nasty holiday gift in the form of the Schannel vulnerability in Microsoft Office. This particular threat allows a hacker to take over the entire system, making it an exceptionally dangerous vulnerability that you can’t ignore. Thankfully, a patch is available to the general public, so you want to apply it as soon as possible.
On October 21st, Microsoft issued the security advisory which states that the vulnerability allows for remote code execution. Even worse, the vulnerability can be found in most supported versions of Microsoft Windows, excluding Windows Server 2003. Users can trigger this vulnerability by opening an infected Microsoft Office file which contains an Object Linking and Embedding object, or an OLE. If the hacker is successful in exploiting the vulnerability, it could mean a completely compromised system on your network. These hackers could then proceed to delete data, install malware, or other sketchy activity.
Earlier this November, the patch was issued. If you haven’t patched your business’s systems yet, it’s imperative that you do so at your earliest convenience.
Thankfully, the vulnerability can’t be taken advantage of unless the system administrator grants the file permission to open. This means that if you download a file with an OLE object from the Internet, a permissions prompt will ask you whether or not you want to download it. For example, a spreadsheet embedded into a Word document would be an OLE object.
In the official security advisory, Microsoft states that any Office file using an OLE object is vulnerable to being infected by this threat. Here are some tips on how to avoid this vulnerability until you apply the security patch.
It’s always important to protect your business from the latest threats as they become known. Updates and patches are regularly released by companies to ensure that they are fixed for the majority of the general public, and your business needs to take advantage of these. The Connection, Inc can apply these updates automatically and remotely with our remote IT maintenance service.
The Connection, Inc can also integrate our Unified Threat Management solution into your network security policy to protect your business from all manners of nasty threats. Our UTM is a comprehensive security solution designed to protect your business from both internal and external threats. For more information about remote maintenance or our UTM solution, give us a call at (732) 291-5938.
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