Extremely Dangerous Microsoft Office bug Finally Patched After 17 Years

As office of its monthly 'Patch Tuesday' updates, Microsoft yesterday released its November 2017 security patches to resolve 53 vulnerabilities across many of its products, including Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Border, ASP.NET Core, .NET Core and the Chackra Core browser engine. There were no zero-day vulnerabilities fixed this time round, but the one patch that'due south seemingly got everybody talking is a 17-year-sometime remote code execution problems (CVE-2017-11882) found in an Office executable called Microsoft Equation Editor. The bug affects all versions of Microsoft Office from the past 17 years on all Windows versions including Windows ten Creators Update.

The bug was discovered recently past a squad of cyber security experts at Embedi and was detailed in a written report that was released yesterday. While the researchers described information technology as "extremely dangerous", Microsoft seemed to downplay it, simply describing the update as 'important'. The Microsoft Equation Editor, which had the long-standing problems, was first released in 2000 and, was installed by default with Office 2000 and Part 2003. The application is used to insert and edit circuitous equations as Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) items in Microsoft Discussion documents. Although it has been replaced by newer software in afterwards versions of Part, some of the code had to be left backside for backwards compatibility with older files that used the OLE-based (EQNEDT32.EXE) equations.

The researchers are advising that everybody with MS Office installed on their systems immediately install the update and also disable EQNEDT32.EXE in the Windows registry to prevent any hereafter problems. According to them, "By inserting several OLEs that exploited the described vulnerability, it was possible to execute an arbitrary sequence of commands (e.thousand. to download an capricious file from the Cyberspace and execute information technology) … Because the component has numerous security problems and the vulnerabilities it contains can be easily exploited, the best option for a user to ensure security is to disable registering of the component in Windows registry".