The Security Mentor

Someone has posted pornographic pictures on the Usenet news service which use Microsoft's latest security hole to take over your PC. The malicious software is nasty but at least it doesn't spread itself. Yet. Right now the only way to get infected is to view a tainted picture using unpatched Microsoft software.

More will follow, I'm sure.

The relevant defenses on a Windows machine (others are unaffected) are

• Run Windows Update and Office Update to get the fixes from Microsoft. Unfortunately, even security experts have trouble figuring out what to update. But it's definitely a step in the right direction.


• Update your antivirus software. The antivirus companies have already started looking for suspicious patterns in picture files. This also may be only a partial solution, depending on how well the antivirus companies can catch new variations.
  -- UPDATE 9/29: The antivirus companies did things right and should detect any attack that relies on this particular security bug --


• Don't download porn.
  "Doctor, it hurts when I do this!" "Well, stop doing that." Any kind of online photo could carry malicious software but it was predictable that the first problems would show up in bad neighborhoods.


• Install a firewall program like Zone Alarm that tells you when an unwanted program tries to connect to the Internet. That won't stop you from getting infected but it will warn you in time to stop your machine from being used to send out spam.


For your IT department or your technical friends, here are technical details of the payload of the first JPEG Trojan in the wild.