The Navigator

Frank Herbert's Dune trilogy is one of the few sci-fi novels I've read and enjoyed. My favourite part of the elaborate culture Herbert constructs are the Guild Navigators. Human beings become mutant through consumption of vast quantities of a drug that turns their minds into devices which can warp space-time, and these creatures power space-craft at trans-luminal velocities.

Some Russian hackers apparently like these books too:

"In late August, while tracking the Sandworm Team, iSIGHT discovered a spear-phishing campaign targeting the Ukrainian government and at least one United States organization. spear-phishing attacks coincided with the NATO summit on Ukraine held in Wales.

On September 3rd, our research and labs teams discovered that the spear-phishing attacks relied on the exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability impacting all supported versions of Microsoft Windows (XP is not impacted) and Windows Server 2008 and 2012. A weaponized PowerPoint document was observed in these attacks.

The vulnerability exists because Windows allows the OLE packager (packager.dll) to download and execute INF files. In the case of the observed exploit, specifically when handling Microsoft PowerPoint files, the packagers allows a Package OLE object to reference arbitrary external files, such as INF files, from untrusted sources.

Now this does not sound to me like a bug as one would ordinarily use the term. This is a consciously designed feature of the OLE packaging API, which is so obvious that it would have showed up in even a cursory design review. Exploiting it, once you know it's there, is probably trivial.

And how, tell me, did iSIGHT (μυωπία) know that it wasn't being used during that month? Do they open all the power-point and excel spreadsheets that the people at JPMorgan send each other?

Why do people trust a company that produces such garbage? Because they charge a lot of money for it?