Microsoft Outlook Security

Microsoft Outlook (comes with Microsoft Office), not Oulook Express (shipped with windows), is a widely used email client. Unfortunately this program is also one of the reasons why worms spread so fast. The following features of Microsoft Outlook enable the spreading of worms:

The alrge ammount of vulnerabilities
The slow speed at which patches are made available to repair those holes
The availability of the address book to worms, sot hey can send themselves to all your contacts, infecting them
The HTML capability (an email can contain malicious code which is executed on your computer)
Outlook has been written in a programming language called 'C' which makes the creation of viruses using Outlook, quite easy
The 'automation' features of Outlook can also be used by viruses

Some of the above problems can be solved, by disabling the html function for example. Which allready has been done in the latest patches. And offcourse, by using a good virusscanner, which scans incoming and outgoing email. And, last but not least, following the basic safety rules mentioned on this site will also save you a lot of misery.

Below are some vulnerability reports for Microsoft Outlook

Outlook 2000