Be cautious about malicious Flash files

As the update from Adobe shows that opening a malicious Flash file can lead to the take over of your Windows XP/2000/ME/98SE PC by some unknown personnel, what is interesting is that Microsoft takes the active role to reveal their action and puts the ball back to Adobe/Macromedia.

Whether you take Adobe's approach or Microsoft's

approach is up to you.

Lots of software fix in last 2 months

There have been MANY vulnerabilitiy discoveries for the last 2 months:

Oracle, IE and Outlook Express, Firefox and Thunderbird, Veritas Netbackup, even Mac OS X.

If you have not done security patch for at least the monthly ones of IE and Outlook Express, you are too lazy. Of course some people find that one IE patch does have problem. Latest news is that the IT distribution version of Serivce Pack 2 for Office 2003 can lead to mysterious crash. So always test before deploy, IT professionals!

Discoveries of about 22 vulnerabilities in Firefox 1.5.01 sounds like a major setback. Yet the quick response and release of tested patch is still giving people (especially newcomers) confidence that these people are serious. Latest patched version of Firefox is version 1.5.0.3. Thunderbird is 1.5.0.2. (except Traditional Chinese version).