Advisories

Hey, OpenOffice Users, Update Your Application NOW!

Highly critical flaw in OpenOffice

By Bogdan Popa, Security and Search Engines Editor

5th of December 2007, 10:53 GMT

Adjust text size:

OpenOffice has always been regarded as the perfect solution for Microsoft Office, a more expensive solution powered by the Redmond-based company. Since it has

been available for free for all Windows, Mac, and Linux users, OpenOffice is installed on millions of computers from all over the world. But, this impressive popularity doesn't necessarily mean that the Office suite is also 100 percent secure. This is why security company Secunia reported, today, a highly critical glitch in all OpenOffice versions prior to 2.3.1. That's why the only solution to avoid a successful exploitation is the update to the latest version of the application.

"A vulnerability has been reported in OpenOffice, which potentially can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user's system," Secunia wrote in the advisory. "The vulnerability is caused due to an unspecified error in the HSQLDB database engine and can be exploited to execute arbitrary static Java code via a specially crafted database document."

OpenOffice.org has already confirmed the problem and published a security advisory in order to give more information about it. "A security vulnerability in HSQLDB, the default database engine shipped with OpenOffice.org 2 (all versions), may allow attackers to execute arbitrary static Java code, by manipulating database documents to be opened by a user," it reads.

OpenOffice has always been a popular application among the users, who are not willing to pay such a big amount of money for an Office suite. For example, OpenOffice recorded no less than 120,490 downloads on Softpedia only for the Windows version. The Office suite is available for most platforms available out there, including Windows, Linux, Solaris and even for Mac OS X. The Mac release is the latest flavor that joined the OpenOffice family, being released a few months ago in beta stage.

If you want to download the latest version of OpenOffice for Windows, it is available right here on Softpedia.

TAGS:

openoffice | security | office | flaw | vulnerability

SEARCH THE NEWS ARCHIVE :

Today's News | Yesterday's News | News Archive

User opinions:

No user comments yet.

Be the first to express your opinion using the form below!

Share your opinion:

SUBMIT PROGRAM \| ADVERTISE \| GET HELP \| SEND US FEEDBACK \| RSS FEEDS \| ENTER NEWS SITE \| ENGLISH BOARD \| ROMANIAN FORUM
© 2001 - 2008 Softpedia. All rights reserved. Softpedia™ and the Softpedia™ logo are registered trademarks of SoftNews NET SRL.	Copyright Information \| Privacy Policy \| Terms of Use \| Update your software \| Archive

NEWS CATEGORIES: