Microsoft announced a series of updates to repair a fault is present in all versions of Windows and Office for the past 19 years, and was detected by researchers at IBM in May. Since then, they worked together to develop the necessary patches.
The vulnerability, present since version of Internet Explorer 3 for Windows 95, allowed the attacker could exploit the flaw to take control of your PC by downloading and using malicious programs. This security issue was referred to by some as WinShock and brings to mind similar cases like the recent Heartbleed, a computer incident that was present in Internet servers since 2011 and recently came to light in April this year.
IBM researchers noted that there is no evidence of a cyber attack based on this vulnerability. However, security experts point to the importance of the installation of updates for Windows to prevent any attacker to exploit this flaw.
Patches are available for versions of Windows Vista, 7, 8 and 8.1, but misses to computers running Windows XP, which only had a few patches since April this year when Microsoft discontinued support the operating system. Since then, the company said no other updates and recommended users to migrate their profiles to new editions of the operating system.