Next week's Patch Tuesday will see the release of seven security bulletins from Microsoft: one will address a critical security vulnerability in Office, while the other six will address important security issues in Office.
The critical bulletin features a vulnerability in Microsoft Office 2003, 2007, and 2010 as well as Word Viewer and Microsoft Office Web Apps. Office for Mac is not affected. The critical vulnerability designation is "not very common for Office vulnerabilities and typically indicates that no user interaction, such as opening an affected file, is required to trigger the vulnerability," Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of security tools firm Qualys, writes.
The vulnerability is of a type that might easily lend itself to malware attacks, so caution is advisable even though nothing bad has been reported as yet. "We recommend being alert for the first Bulletin and prepare for a fast roll-out of that update," Kandek added.
The other six bulletins are all rated important. Three of upcoming updates affect components of the Office family (Works 9, Infopath and Sharepoint) while two both involve privilege elevation flaws in Windows. The final bulletin covers an update for all versions of MS-SQL Server, also tackling a local escalation-of-privilege vulnerability.
