When no news isn't good news

[unixronin]

Via C|Net:

Critical IE 7 exploit making the rounds

Microsoft issued a critical security warning Tuesday that a malicious exploit is making the rounds and attacking vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 7.  [...]

You almost have to wonder why they even bother making the announcement.  Has there ever been a period longer than about a week when there was NOT some unpatched system-pwning Internet Explorer exploit in the wild?

Comments

[rbos.livejournal.com]

The problem with this one is that it's being pretty aggressively pursued by malware people these days.

Christmas has always historically been the Big Infection Vector, with lots of people getting new computers. We've got a bit of a "perfect storm" effect, combining Christmas, large pre-existing botnets, and aggressively deployed injection attacks on major Internet sites. Further, it happens right after Patch Tuesday, which gives the maximum possible time for infection.

So it's not the exploit itself that could cause problems, it's the timing and the aggressiveness of the attack.