Security & Privacy + Software & Apps

It’s security update time for Microsoft Office, both the 2008 and 2004 versions. If you use Office 2008, you’ll need this 114 MB download, which fixes, among other things, “vulnerabilities in Office 2008 that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer’s memory with malicious code”, as well as an installer problem, whereby the Office installer wrote files with an incorrect user ID, meaning that many users couldn’t access the programs and support files correctly. The update also fixes general reliability and a number of bugs.

For Office 2004, a 13 MB download, fixes bugs and two security issues: one for Excel, and a critical vulnerability

“that could allow remote code execution if a user opens a malformed Office file. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of an affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights.”