08.02.2020, 23:32
Microsoft Office products were the most commonly exploited by cybercriminals around the world and nearly 73 percent of cyber exploits were performed in MS Office products in the third quarter of this year, a new report has said.
According to information gathered by PreciseSecurity.com, other exploited applications by cybercriminals included browsers and operating systems, among others.
"Data shows that exactly 72.85 percent of cyber exploits were performed in MS Office products as of the third quarter of this year," Marco Mathew from the computer security website said in a statement on Wednesday.
MS Office products were followed by Browsers with 13.47 percent of the total number of exploits by cybercriminals, Android with 9.09 percent, Java with 2.36 percent, Adobe Flash with 1.57 percent and PDF with 0.66 percent.
Some of the most common vulnerabilities in MS office.com/setup were related to stack overflow errors in the Equation Editor application. Other vulnerabilities were CVE-2017-8570, CVE-2017-8759, and CVE-2017-0199, among others.
Another important vulnerability was related to a zero-day issue CVE-2019-1367 that produced memory corruption and allowed remote code execution on the target system, the report mentioned.
The top five countries that are sources of web-based attacks include the US with 79.16 percent of the market share, followed by the Netherlands with 15.58 percent, Germany with 2.35 percent, France with 1.85 percent and Russia 1.05 percent.
In computer security, an exploit makes reference to individuals such as hackers or criminals that make use and take advantage of a bug or vulnerability in a specific software or computer program.