Microsoft has warned all its Windows users of something extremely dangerous during these times of COVID-19 outbreak where everyone is working from home and a majority of them are using Windows machines. The company has revealed that they found out about its users being attacked by hackers. On further investigation, they have noticed that these attacks are being carried out because of an “undisclosed security vulnerability found in all supported versions of Windows, including Windows 10”.
Now, if you make sense of the above statement given by Microsoft than it is pretty devastation and massive. To make things worse, people are at their homes currently using their PCs more often than they used to before the virus outbreak took place which makes them even more vulnerable. At the moment, the company says that there is no patch available for this vulnerability which is similar to COVID-19 which also does not have an antidote or vaccine.
Also, Microsoft says that this vulnerability is “critical” which is the rank given by the company to understand the severeness of the bug. Microsoft also reveals how this bug works and before you say that this will make more people attack them, this is based on previous reports received by the company so it has nothing to do with more hacking attempts since they are already known.
As per Microsoft, hackers can exploit this bug “by tricking a victim into opening a malicious document. Once the document is opened — or viewed in Windows Preview — an attacker can remotely run malware, such as ransomware, on a vulnerable device”
The company also revealed that they are aware of hackers launching “limited, targeted attacks” but did not reveal how massive the scale of these attacks and also who was behind these attacks since it is usually found out as hackers are known to keep their identity, although cryptic, after attacking