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Office Security patches - May 2008

Microsoft’s May 2008 patches include Word, Outlook, Publisher and Access. As usual we look at the patches to help you get all the updates you need.

There are four security patches from Microsoft this month – three relate to Microsoft Office and the fourth is worth mentioning because of the ironic twist.

The Word update is to deal with yet another way to hack a Word document to gain access to your computer (ie run a program when opening a Word document). We’ve seen many such problems and patches in the past – and this won’t be the last. 

(Note that this new Word vulnerability also includes a patch for Outlook 2007 – for most people this isn’t an issue because the one patch will fix both Word 2007 and Outlook 2007. But if you’ve only installed Outlook 2007 (and nothing else from Office 2007) then you need to install this fix. Outlook uses Word as the email editor so problems in Word often become problems in Outlook as well. Apparently earlier versions of Outlook don’t get mentioned as requiring special patching.)

Also in the ‘déjà vu’ category is a patch for a security problem with the Jet database engine which is at the core of Microsoft Access and other Office systems. Jet technology is so commonly used by Microsoft that the security bulletin classifies it under ‘Windows’ not ‘Office’.

Publisher also gets a mention this month with a security update to stop a hacked Publisher document giving access to your computer.

The non-Office patch is just ironic – it fixes two security issues in Microsoft’s own Malware Protection Engine. In other words Microsoft even has security problems in newer software specifically designed to protect customers against security problems. https://office-watch.com/kb/?952044

Microsoft’s summary has a list of patches arranged by software, scroll down to the heading ‘Affected Software and Download Locations’.

Many people will now use the Windows Update system and you may already have the updates downloaded and installed. Others are more wary and prefer to separately patch computers, that’s where the list of updates comes in …

Under the ‘Windows’ heading you’ll find the Access / Jet patches for Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003 (not for Vista).

Under the ‘Office’ heading there are patches for Office 2000, XP, 2003 (Service Packs 2 and 3) and Office 2007 (original flavour and Service Pack 1). Its here you’ll see the mention of Outlook 2007 requiring the patch otherwise linked to Word 2007.

IMPORTANT NOTE: the prominently listed patches for Office 2000, XP and 2003 overlook one important patch that listed further down. The “Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats” (which lets you open the new OOXML documents with earlier versions of Office) has a separate patch. We suggest Office Watch users install the compatibility pack to save hassle when a ‘docx’ etc file arrives.

Office for Mac 2004 and 2008 have security patches listed as well.

The free Word Viewer 2003 software also has patches.

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