In a case of “too late and done that before”, the guys at Microsoft are coming up with some scaled down online versions of its Office suites. Big deal. With so many so called Web 2.0 services around, why should I even bother to wait for them ? They will have to give me free t-shirts before I use their site. Good thinking ?

techdigest says

Presumably in a bid to compete with the ever diversifying range of online products from Google, amongst others, there are reports emerging that Microsoft may consider releasing free, scaled-down web versions of its popular Office software.

Oh darn. Here’s another one of those zero day bugs that gets pretty sneaky dropping Trojans all over your PC when you open an infected MS Word file. Be very careful as you might leave backdoors on your PC….Take heed indeed..Let’s hope Microsoft will release a patch for this on the next Patch Day - Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2006.

Symantec’s researchers said that they’d analyzed a sample of the in-the-wild attack and confirmed that it worked against a fully-patched edition of Office 2000 — Word 2000 is one of the applications bundled with that version of the Office suite — running on a fully-patched Windows 2000 machine.

“Although we have not been able to exploit other versions of Office with this specific sample, others may be affected by the vulnerability,” Symantec said in an alert issued to customers of its DeepSight threat system. The Cupertino, Calif.-based security vendor characterized the exploit as “reliable” and added that it was “mostly transparent to an end-user.”

If a Word 2000 user opens the malicious document attached to the attacker’s e-mail message, a Trojan horse drops another file onto the computer; that file (actually another Trojan) drops yet another file, this time a backdoor component which leaves the machine open to additional attack or misuse.

Microsoft is not too happy about an internal ‘Office’ Training Video that got out into the internet. It was supposed to be …

“The two videos that Ricky and Stephen recorded for us in 2004 were a light-hearted way of getting our staff to think about the values they attach to working at Microsoft and, through the character of David Brent, illustrate what not to do in the workplace,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in an email. “These videos were produced for internal use and were never intended to be viewed by the public.”

I guess no videos are safe from being uploaded to popular Video sites like YouTube nowadays and its funny why they did not implement some sort of digital rights management on it. Goes to show you that even big dinosaurs like MS do bungle up sometimes.

Here’s the source - Microsoft Unhappy With Release Of ‘Office’ Training Video

Windows Sysadmins take note ! Another round of patches has come up.

On Tuesday, Microsoft Corporation released 12 security fixes for its Windows operating system and Office business software. In its monthly security bulletin, Microsoft also said two of the fixes are for vulnerabilities in some versions of its Office software that carry the highest “critical” rating. All of the patches are to fix weaknesses that could allow an attacker to take complete control of a person’s computer.

12 security fixes from Microsoft Corporation for Windows users source