Defense contractors targeted in spear phishing campaign Microsoft last week said it would rush to deliver a patch for a recently discovered hole in Microsoft Word that was being used in sophisticated online attacks.The company plans to release a fix for the hole in Word XP and Word 2003 on or before its scheduled June 13 patch release. Customers were advised to run Word in Safe Mode in the meantime to prevent exploitation.The warning came after anti-virus firms reported focused “spear phishing” attacks against companies and government agencies in the European Union and the United States that used the Word flaw to plant Trojan horse programs on vulnerable machines. The attacks are rated “low” for most companies. However, that could change if the Word exploit is circulated widely, said Johannes Ullrich, CTO of the SANS Internet Storm Center. SecurityPhishingSocial Engineering