“Microsoft’s security response center has confirmed that a second zero-day vulnerability in its Word software program is being targeted by unknown attackers,” Ryan Naraine reports for eWeek.
“The latest flaw comes just days after the software maker issued a security advisory to warn customers against opening Word documents from untrusted sources. The two vulnerabilities are entirely unrelated,” Naraine reports.
Naraine reports, “The flaws were discovered during actual code execution attacks against select targets and highlight the Redmond, Wash., vendor’s struggle to cope with gaping holes in one of its most widely used products.”
Naraine reports, “According to a US-CERT advisory, the latest bug is a memory corruption issue that occurs when a Word file is rigged with malformed data structures. No other details were made available. Microsoft has not yet issued a formal prepatch advisory but, in a blog entry, Security Program Manager Scott Deacon listed affected software versions as Word 2000, Word 2002, Word 2003 and the Word Viewer 2003.”
“Microsoft plans to issue six security bulletins as part of its December batch of patches, but there are no Office fixes on tap. Unless an out-of-cycle update is shipped, the Word flaws will remain unpatched until at least Jan. 9, 2007,” Naraine reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: One can only hope that the poor bastards who are stuck in “Microsoft’s security response center” qualify for overtime. What a job; a more perfect hell has yet to be constructed. We wonder, has a more inept company ever had so much undeserved success as Microsoft?
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