The Security Mentor

Simply opening a Microsoft Word document which has been put together by a bad guy can allegedly take over your computer. The advisory about the Word bug from security firm Secunia says that it's been proven possible to crash Word, but that they haven't seen proof yet that you can take over a system.

Unfortunately, the person who found this bug published it yesterday without letting Microsoft know first. So the bad guys have a head start and there's no patch available yet. Microsoft needs to study the problem and test a fix before they can release a patch. On the bright side the bad guys haven't started using it yet.

Protect yourself by not opening .DOC files unless you have some reason to trust the sender. You don't eat apples from wicked witches, and you shouldn't feed Word documents to your computer if they might come from malicious people.