British government survives zero day WMF attack
by Ivana Strahija on January 25th, 2006 No thanks to Microsoft, the British government survived a China originating WMF attack. English were smart enough to have an email filtering system.
Before 5. January, when the Windows WMF flaw was finally patched, British government endured Chinese hacker attacks. It's still unknown if independent hackers or the Chinese government initiated the attack.
70 people in Parliament and other government institutions were sent contaminated messages, which posed as information about a secret rendezvous. Attackers tried to fool recipients into opening an infected attachment containing the WMF Setabortproc Trojan. The infected emails were blocked by MessageLabs' email filtering system.
Anti-virus firm F-Secure thinks that the majority of Windows computers remain vulnerable to the WMF exploit because users are yet to apply Microsoft's patch. The firm recently detected a phishing scam that exploited the vulnerability in an attempt to install a spyware Trojan on vulnerable computers.
