Microsoft Office 2008 patch arrives a month after disclosure

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 09 December 2010 08:34

Business IT - Security

An update for a security problem disclosed last month in Microsoft Office for Mac 2008 has finally been released. But there's no sign yet of the corresponding update for Office 2004.

As part of November's Patch Tuesday announcements, Microsoft published security bulletin MS10-087 which described a set of vulnerabilities affecting various versions of Microsoft Office.

A particular issue was the possibility of remote code execution triggered by maliciously crafted RTF emails.

Patches were immediately available for Office XP, 2003, 2007, 2010 and 2011, but a footnote to the list of affected software stated "The security updates for Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac, Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, and Open XML File Format Converter for Mac are unavailable at this time."

A month later, the situation has improved slightly.

The Office 2008 12.2.8 update fixes the RTF email issue along with other vulnerabilities, and also delivers a fix for an Entourage bug that could cause the program to quit when opening an email containing inline attachments, sending an email, or clicking meeting invitations.

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