Microsoft Office Patent Infringement Issue

A while back, Microsoft was sued by a Canadian software company for a patent infringement on some code in the Office products that has to do with Custom XML, which most of us would never see or use.  Microsoft lost the suit and appealed.  This week they lost the appeal and must issue new versions of Word and Office or stop selling it by January 11, 2010.

This has caused some concern from a few of our Clients.  However, it is nothing to worry about.  Microsoft has already corrected the issue and will have the corrected versions of Word 2007 and Office 2007 available by the January 11th date.  Office 2010, scheduled for release in June of 2010 does not contain the affected code.  Existing installations of Word and Office are not affected by the ruling.

Serious Adobe PDF Exploit

A serious exploit of Adobe PDF files has been discovered and malicious PDF files are being detected on the Internet since December 11th or so.

There is no patch for this issue at this time and anti-virus applications are not yet able to detect the malware due to how it is packaged. 

The problem appears to be in a JavaScript function inside of Adobe.  If you know how, you can disable JavaScript in Adobe Reader.  (Edit – Preferences – JavaScript – uncheck Enable Acrobat JavaScript).  Note that this may mean some PDFs do not display or act correctly, but it will mitigate the current issue.  Once a patch has been released you can turn it back on if you want.

Of course you should be careful downloading any type of file from the Internet.  However, be extra careful with PDFs at the moment.  Once a patch is released, we will post another article here.