Word again at risk from exploit
Patched state lasts two days as new vulnerability found
Just days after Microsoft released a bundle of
patches covering numerous serious security flaws in its Word and other Office
programs, yet another vulnerability is threatening users of Word documents.
The latest zero-day flaw, much like the series of earlier ones, can be exploited by a maliciously
formed document to take advantage of a parsing error, cause memory corruption and potentially execute
code, leading to remote system access. Users, after a few hours of feeling secure, are advised to
exercise caution when opening Word documents, and to ignore any documents received unexpectedly
or from untrusted sources.
Microsoft's advisory on the vulnerability and exploit - which, once again, is described as
in use only for 'very limited, targeted attacks', is
here, and an alert from
Secunia can be found here.
Microsoft has informed users of its OneCare software that, unlike some
previous issues, protection has been added for exploits
using the vulnerability.
16 February 2007
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