Cyber Attacks via Excel?

In order to conduct cyber espionage, miscreants need to find a way to access victims’ computers remotely. This often takes the form of sending an infected document, generally a PDF, to the victim.

A new targeted attack has been discovered by researchers at F-Secure who look to take advantage of people’s greater trust in Excel files. Rather than send infected PDF documents, this cyber attack uses infected Excel files that runs a backdoor when accessed.

“As you can see, such attack files can look like perfectly normal and credible document files,” writes Mikko Hypponen.

The attack files contain such seemingly innocuous information like personnel files, a list of terrorist organizations, a budget document, a World Cup schedule and a conference agenda.

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