A massive cyber attack has struck the IOC, UN and government agencies. IT security firm McAffe has posted a list of 72 organisations that were targeted over a five year period. Including the International Olympic Committee, United Nations and some security firms. There is speculation that China may be behind the attacks, but this has been denied by Beijing. Speaking to BBC News, McAfee’s chief European technology officer, Raj Samani, said the attacks were still ongoing. The attacks where initiated by sending the victim an E-Mail with a malicious attachment that would then execute and compromise the target computer and open a channel to a remote website, giving the sender access to the data on the network. This seems to be the fault of Outlook allowing attachments to execute and compromise Windows computers. if Windows was actually more secure, it would not allow this to happen at all, but brain dead software like MS Outlook just lets this happen without trying to stop the user. This is due to VBscript that is executed and allows the attachment to run. Switching off Active Scripting can help stop this happening, and if you switch to some other E-mail client like Thunderbird, there will be more security. But there is some information here about disabling Active Scripting.
I hope someone will find this useful.