14 DAY TRIAL // OpenOffice is an office suite and it is often presented as the perfect alternative for the expensive product developed by Microsoft Office. OpenOffice offers a greater number of advantages than the giant's solution, being available under an open-source license while providing the same features as Microsoft's tool. The office suite is available for multiple platforms including Windows, Mac and multiple Linux distributions and can be downloaded for free from the official webpage.
Because many of you are currently using OpenOffice, you should know that the company identified a vulnerability that can allow an attacker to execute malicious code and compromise your system. Security software Secunia rated the flaw as highly critical and said that after a successful exploitation of the vulnerability, an attacker can execute malicious code to control an affected computer.
"A vulnerability has been reported in OpenOffice, which potentially can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user's system. The vulnerability is caused due to integer overflows within the processor for WMF/EMF files. This can be exploited to cause a heap-based buffer overflow by e.g. tricking a user into opening a specially crafted WMF/EMF file. Successful exploitation may allow the execution of arbitrary code," Secunia said.
The developer of the OpenOffice suite confirmed the issue and also added that the vulnerability affects all platforms that can run the application and concerns only the versions before 2.1. The fix was already released and it is available here or you can protect your system by installing the latest version of the application (currently 2.1).
If you want to download the newest version for the OpenOffice suite, you can find it available as a free download on Softpedia or on the official website of the product.