Kerry Brown said:
I have seen it on three customer's computers in the last three days.
They were all up to date with Windows updates, running an antivirus,
one was running MS AntiSpyware. As near as I can tell they all came
in via the .wmf exploit. One was in a spam email. They had the
preview pane open and viewing the email installed the malware. Two
were while surfing the net. Both times they clicked on a link in a
google search and they were immediately infected. See the following
link for details of the exploit.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/912840.mspx
Are you sure about that preview pane story? The Microsoft Security
Advisory claims that one at least has to *click* on something or
*open* an *attachment*:
[Start quote:]
Mitigating Factors:
* In an E-mail based attack involving the current exploit, customers
would have to be persuaded to click on a link within a malicious
e-mail or open an attachment that exploited the vulnerability. At
this point, no attachment has been identified in which a user can be
attacked simply by reading mail.
[End quote.]
[This is from the January 3 version of the Advisory. The earlier
wording was somewhat less specific.]
I also thought that a (OE) (pre-)view was enough, but I checked some
(innocent) JPEGs in an HTML message and they are displayed, *despite*
disabling (un-registering) the Windows Picture and Fax viewer
(Shimgvw.dll). So apparently JPEG in e-mail is rendered by some other
component than the Windows Picture and Fax viewer. Of course I didn't
check any malicious 'pictures', so I could be wrong.
Anyway, the good news is that if everything goes according to plan,
we will have a (MS) patch (security update) in a week (January 10).
The only effective workaround right now is to enable hardware DEP
for all programs (software DEP won't stop it) or disable the Windows
picture and fax viewer. Both workarounds can cause problems.
Hardware DEP may break some drivers and a lot of games won't run.
Unregistering shimgvw.dll seems to be the best workaround but it may
cause some minor problems with html email and some web sites.
Kerry