Now I feel really reassured ....

[D]

Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.2.6 Update

This update fixes vulnerabilities in Office 2004 that an attacker can
use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory with malicious
code. [no less!]

Applies to: Office 2004 Standard Edition, Office 2004 Student and
Teacher Edition, Office 2004 Professional Edition, Microsoft Word 2004
for Mac, Microsoft Excel 2004 for Mac, Microsoft PowerPoint 2004 for
Mac, Microsoft Entourage 2004 for Mac.

 

[picardmeister]

It sounds like a buffer overflow/overrun vulnerability was fixed. This
type of vulnerability has existed in plenty of other software.

For example, a whole bunch of these were fixed in various Mac OS
components in a recent security update
(http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304063). Many of the
other updates listed at
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61798 also include one
or more fixes for this class of vulnerability. There were a whole
bunch of these fixes in this distribution of Linux
http://www.debian.org/security/2006/, many of which apply to other
distributions.

For a primer on this subject, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffer_overflow.

 

[D]

It sounds like a buffer overflow/overrun vulnerability was fixed. This
type of vulnerability has existed in plenty of other software.

For example, a whole bunch of these were fixed in various Mac OS
components in a recent security update
(http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304063). Many of the
other updates listed at
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61798 also include one
or more fixes for this class of vulnerability. There were a whole
bunch of these fixes in this distribution of Linux
http://www.debian.org/security/2006/, many of which apply to other
distributions.

For a primer on this subject, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffer_overflow.

Thanks. I'll have a look.