Security & Privacy + Software & Apps

Microsoft has issued patches for some versions of Microsoft Office that suffer from a “critical” or “important” vulnerability, but, while the Mac OS X versions of Office (2004 and 2008) have the same vulnerability, the company has not issued a security update for them. Microsoft says that the Mac versions of Office are vulnerable, but says nothing, in their security advisory, about when a Mac security update would be available.

The problem is the following:

This security update resolves a publicly disclosed vulnerability and several privately reported vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office PowerPoint that could allow remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted PowerPoint file. An attacker who successfully exploited any of these vulnerabilities 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. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.

So until Microsoft issues a patch for Mac versions of Office, you should be careful not to open PowerPoint files that come from untrusted sources (such as downloads from web sites). We’ll keep you posted when the update is available.