Technical Information

Brief overview of the risk:
When using vulnerable versions of Office, if a user were logged on with administrative user rights, an attacker who successfully exploited these vulnerabilities could take complete control of the 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.
Detailed Information on the risk:
This bulletin covers remote code execution vulnerabilities in Powerpoint and Excel. The Excel vulnerability is currently being exploited in the wild with the Mdropper Trojan, which has been associated with a large number of compound document attacks in recent months. The problem stems from pointer arithmetic that can be manipulated by a malformed spreadsheet. The Powerpoint vulnerability is caused by a heap overflow.Further information on this exploit is available at : MS07-015