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NEWS FROM THE LAB - Friday, April 4, 2014
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April 8th: Not Just About XP Posted by Sean @ 12:43 GMT

April 8th will soon be upon us! And that means…


Countdown Clocks

…the end of extended support for Windows XP. But not just XP. Office 2003 is also reaching its life.

And that's especially important to know because there's currently an Office vulnerability in the wild.

Microsoft released its Security Bulletin Advance Notification yesterday:

Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification for April 2014

And the good news is: a patch for the Word vulnerability appears to be in the pipeline. It's critical that everybody still using Office 2003 apply this update. Why? Because it will only take days for the patch to be reversed and for related exploits to be injected into exploit kits. At which point, browsing the web becomes considerably more hazardous for anybody with Office installed. Particularly if your browser is configured to "open" RTF files.

So prepare to patch next Tuesday! Do it.

Do you still have plans to use XP post-April 8th? Check out this Safe and Savvy post:

7 things to do if you�re going to keep using Windows XP after April 8, 2014

Carefully note that step 3 also includes advice to tighten Office security settings. Something you can do before next Tuesday.