Animated Cursor Flaw Remains in Cross Hairs.

IT organizations are being urged to deploy a patch for a bug affecting how Microsoft Windows handles animated cursors as spammers step up their efforts to exploit the flaw--this time with a promise of lewd pictures of celebrity hotel heiress Paris Hilton.

The spammed e-mail messages have subject lines such as "Hot pictures of Paris Hilton nude" but actually contain an embedded image of adult film star and entrepreneur Jenna Jameson. When clicked on, the image links to a Web site containing the malicious Troj/Iffy-B Trojan horse, which in turn points to another piece of malware targeting the Microsoft vulnerability.

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, in Abingdon, England, said companies should have an anti-spam solution in place to prevent these kinds of messages from arriving at employees' desktops in the first place.

"It's about time that alarm bells rang in the brains of PC users when they receive an unsolicited e-mail offering them porn or salacious celebrity snapshots," he said. "Year after year we have seen hackers using this kind of social engineering to fool innocent users into clicking on a link or opening a dangerous file."

The fact that attackers are still looking to exploit a flaw patched more than a week ago came as little surprise to Dan Hubbard of San Diego-based Websense. Researchers at the company announced they had found some 2,000 unique sites hosting the exploit code or pointing to compromised machines hosting the code.

"Although organizations appear to be getting better, we still see exploits for vulnerabilities long after the patches have been released," Hubbard said. "As an example ...