Security & Privacy + Software & Apps

Microsoft has released updates for Office 2004 and 2008, both of which are described as follows:

This update contains several improvements to enhance stability, compatibility, and performance. In addition, this update includes fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer’s memory with malicious code.

While stability, compatibility and performance are great, we noticed the “vulnerabilities” that can lead attackers to overwrite your memory with malicious code; otherwise known as buffer overflows. If you’ve ever wondered exactly what that means, you can check the Wikipedia entry for buffer overflow.

In the meantime, you can get the updates using Microsoft’s Auto-Update tool, or from Microsoft’s web site: get the Office 2004 update or the Office 2008 update, as necessary. They are 15 and 104 MB respectively.