Foresight

[gravito.livejournal.com]

Microsoft patched the GDI+ JPEG Buffer Overflow Vulnerability last week, a proof-of-concept that could crash the computer came out the day after, and just an hour ago, a full-blown exploit was released.

A virus/worm will probably be out this weekend, maybe even as soon as Friday afternoon. I would be surprised if Monday came around without the media revisiting this issue. While this exploit cannot be used on the scale of Sasser or Blaster, it is entirely possible employees world-wide will be getting an exuberant number of dud emails Friday or Saturday that they might need to discard. They might also send calls to their tech support saying, "I can't see this image" and it may be possible that VirusScanners will be reporting infections when users read emails that are not real infections.

As an additional incentive to view the image, the latest virus might use phrases indicating the image is pornography. I fully expect that to happen and employees might be offended by the subject and contents of the emails they receive.

(Cross-posted to my journal and here. If you want to impress your boss over the weekend, send this to him/her today.)