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Excel Vulnerability Issues, Take Two
David Utter
Staff Writer
2006-06-21
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Hot on the heels of the news of one extremely critical remote code execution flaw in Excel comes the news of a second problem with Microsoft's spreadsheet program.
 | | Excel Vulnerability Issues, Take Two |  |
Another day, another Excel problem. The start of summer has turned up the heat on Microsoft's security team and Excel programmers, who now have a pair of arbitrary code execution problems to fix in the program.
The most recent advisory posted by the Secunia tracking site reported that the latest flaw has been confirmed in Excel 2003 SP2, with all updates in place. Although no exploit code has been seen in the wild, Secunia expects to see such code soon as the problem is "quite simple to exploit."
This problem centers on how Excel handles hyperlinks. A driver, hlink.dll, causes the vulnerability due to a boundary error when handling hyperlinks, the advisory noted. A buffer overflow can be caused by clicking a specially crafted URL in an Excel document.
Once exploited, arbitrary code can be executed by the attacker. At this time, Secunia recommends that users of Microsoft Office not open untrusted documents or follow links in Office documents until a fix has been provided by Microsoft.
Microsoft recently confirmed another Excel problem that is even more critical than the latest vulnerability. That flaw has already seen one report of Excel being exploited by code in the wild.
Less permissive access rights were cited as a mitigating factor in the earlier vulnerability. Exploit code may not be as damaging since it only has the rights the user has on a system. Unless the user has administrative rights, the code should not have as great an impact.
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Tag: Excel
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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