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Microsoft warned Thursday that hackers are actively exploiting a software vulnerability in PowerPoint, the company's presentation application.There's no patch yet for the bug, which could allow an attacker to completely control a computer. It affects Office 2000 Service Pack 3, Office XP SP3, Office 2003 SP3, and Office 2004 for Mac, Microsoft said in an advisory. Office 2007 is unaffected.Microsoft said it has seen limited, targeted attacks. The Danish security company Secunia ranked the problem as "extremely critical," its most severe rating.Secunia said the vulnerability "is caused due to an unspecified error that may result in access to an invalid object in memory when parsing a specially crafted PowerPoint file."Microsoft advised users to not open or save Office files that come from untrusted sources. If the file is opened, users won't have much of an indication that it's a malicious file."Usually, these files look legit when opened, so it is quite easy to fall prey and not even notice that something malicious ran in the background," according to a post on the company's Malware Protection Center blog.Hackers frequently hunt for vulnerabilities in commonly used software products, as it's another avenue other than the operating system to infect a computer with malicious software.To be hacked, a user would either have to download a malicious file hosted on a Web site or open a file sent through e-mail, Microsoft said.Microsoft has added a signature that will block access to PowerPoint exploit files in its Windows Live OneCare and Forefront Client security products. The signature is included in definition update 1.55.975.0 or higher.The company noted that the exploit files have been recently submitted to VirusTotal, a Web site that aggregates antivirus engines.Malware can be submitted to see which security products detect it. The site is often used by hackers to determine if their malware will be blocked by certain security software.

IBM sees Conficker hitting 4 percent of PCs
IBM is the second company in two days to suggest that the number of computers infected by the Conficker.C worm may be higher than previously thought.After scanning 2 million computers over the past 24 hours, IBM's Internet Security Systems (ISS) division said Thursday that it had spotted the worm on 4 percent of the IP addresses it monitored.[ Internet infrastructure provider OpenDNS was the first company to discover that Conficker.C infections it counted were much higher than expected. | Beware: Fake security software scammers have been jumping on Conficker. | Learn how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]Although Conficker is clearly the worst worm outbreak in years, the results came as a surprise, according to Holly Stewart, a threat response manager with ISS. "It is higher than what we expected; I thought we'd see 1 to 2 percent," Stewart said.Late last week, IBM researchers reverse-engineered Conficker and figured out a way to track infections by measuring peer-to-peer traffic on the network. They used that technique to reach their estimate.The results are similar to numbers released Wednesday by OpenDNS, which said it had also spotted a much larger number of infections than expected. Both IBM and OpenDNS' numbers count Conficker.C, the latest variant of the worm, and one that is easier to spot communicating on the network.Conficker began spreading in October 2008, using a handful of sneaky tricks to spread. Once it infects a machine, it can spread very quickly on a local area network by taking advantage of a now-patched flaw in Microsoft Windows.Experts had pegged Conficker infections in the 2 million to 4 million range, but IBM's numbers suggest that they may be much higher than that, perhaps in the tens of millions.Still, Stewart cautioned against concluding that 4 percent of Internet users had been infected. "It's not a perfect number, nothing is. But it's the best that we can give with the data we have right now."It's possible that Conficker infections are approaching 4 percent, said Danny McPherson, chief security officer with Arbor Networks. Because Conficker is more likely to infect certain types of users — broadband consumers are generally more vulnerable than enterprise or government users, for example — estimates like ISS' could come from a sample that does not represent the Internet as a whole, he said.  Still, by any measure, Conficker is a big problem. "Even if they're off by an order of magnitude — which is possible —  the number of infected machines is immense." 

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