An example of the sophistication of malware operators has very recently been reported that affects Adobe Flash.

1. Adobe released what was for them a huge patch for Flash recently.

2. So few people applied the Adobe patch that malware writers were able to back-engineer the patch to discover how to attack unpatched Flash.

3. Attacks on Flash have now progressed to use of a phony Microsoft Word document sent as an attachment or embedded in an email that many people will open in Internet Explorer. The malware doesn't affect either Word or IE but IE can open Flash so it sends the malicious code from the Word document directly to Flash (in unpatched Flash installations) to infect the computer, potentially giving the malware's creator complete control of the computer.

LESSON TO LEARN: All of the applications on your computer can potentially communicate with each other, often invisibly to you, so you need to keep ALL OF YOUR STUFF up to date and protected with good antimalware programs and operating practices.

John