Booby-trapped Word documents in the wild exploit critical Microsoft 0day

There's a new zeroday attack in the wild that's surreptitiously installing malware on fully-patched computers. It does so by exploiting a vulnerability in most or all versions of Microsoft Word.

The attack starts with an e-mail that attaches a malicious Word document, according to a blog post published Saturday by researchers from security firm FireEye. Once opened, exploit code concealed inside the document connects to an attacker-controlled server. It downloads a malicious HTML application file that's disguised to look like a document created in Microsoft's Rich Text Format. Behind the scenes, the .hta file downloads additional payloads from "different well-known malware families."