Another ‘Critical’ MS Office Patch on Tap

Microsoft is on the verge of shipping another “critical” bulletin to cover holes in its Microsoft Office productivity suite.

The world’s largest software maker plans to include the Office bulletin in a batch of three updates in this month’s Patch Tuesday, according to an advance notice released Sept. 7.

In the first eight months of 2006, Microsoft has shipped patches for a whopping 24 flaws affecting all versions of Office, and the latest batch will certainly push that number much higher.

Over the last few months, attackers and flaw finders have been pounding away at Office applications, discovering new ways to attack millions of Windows machines.

The increased activity has also coincided with zero-day, code-execution attacks against users of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, three of the most widely used programs in the Microsoft Office product line.

The planned Office fix comes just days after confirmation from the Redmond, Wash., company that an undocumented flaw affecting Word 2000 was being exploited in zero-day malware attacks.

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