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Microsoft Windows is a preferred target for cyber criminals

Microsoft Windows is a preferred target for cyber criminals - Ultimate Guide

By
Kevin
2019-04-17 17:48:52

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After the attack made by computer hackers to accounts of email services respective to Microsoft Outlook, Hotmail and MSN, they were vulnerable for a period of 3 months, approximately, corresponding to an interval between January and March. In addition, these cyber criminals also have the ability to implement exploit without patches in Internet Explorer aimed at spying on Windows users and stealing their local data, making them equally vulnerable to Microsoft Windows 7, Windows 10 and Windows Server 2012 R2. These details make Microsoft one of the preferred targets for computer hackers.

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While Microsoft made a statement that the number of accounts, belonging to the services of Outlook, Hotmail and MSN, which were committed by the violation, were a "limited" amount. However, a later article in the technology website, The Verge, Microsoft made the confession that the violation suffered by Outlook.com was much worse than what they had revealed at first, but that efforts were made to attack the problem.

On the other hand we have the great package of applications of the Office family offered by Microsoft, which is widely used by many companies and individual users (people) to create a variety of documents (such as presentations, spreadsheets, reports and more). This represented the means of greater access to the cyber attacks that were detected by security products, being a 70% in the last quarter of 2018.





Alexander Liskin of Kaspersky Labs expressed, during the Security Analysts Summit 2019, that the fact that the attacks carried out because of the Office is in such a large amount, is due to the integration with Windows, its interoperability (it allows the systems of disparate information from several vendors working together), among other things bad decisions made by Microsoft from a security point of view when creating Office.

Apparently, during 2018, Kaspersky Labs researchers encountered several zero-day vulnerabilities in Office and reported to Microsoft. Although none of the relevant vulnerabilities belonged to Office, if they pertain to related components. Among these most exploited vulnerabilities were CVE-2017-11882 and CVE-2018-0802, which although they did not directly affect Word, were aimed at affecting the Office equation editor process (through which users can build Mathematics and science equations).

What makes vulnabilities such as CVE-2017-11882 and CVE-2018-0802 so relevant is that advanced skills are not required. Reasons like this are what make Microsoft a favorite target of cyber criminals.





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