Adobe has delivered emergency patches for Flash before. In 2010, for instance, it rushed out fixes three times, one in only six days, the other two times in seven days each.

In hindsight, the seriousness of the Flash vulnerability should have been apparent. On March 17, Microsoft told Office users to by running an advanced configuration tool.

Microsoft made those recommendations several hours before RSA's top executive admitted that his company's network had been breached.

The RSA employee who opened the attack Excel file must have been using a version of Office earlier than Office 2010. In a , a manager and security engineer with the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) said that Excel 2010 was not susceptible to the attacks then circulating.

Excel 2010 automatically enables DEP (data execution prevention), a key Windows anti-exploit technology, and also isolates malicious files inside Office 2010's "Protected View," a "sandbox" that prevents attack code from escaping the application.