Be wary of Microsoft Office attachments.

IBM have announced its Internet Security Systems (ISS) X-Force research and development team has provided customers with protection for several serious flaws announced by Microsoft.

The most significant Microsoft disclosure this month is a vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange Server that can result in remote code execution. By enticing a user to view a specially crafted email, an attacker could trigger an exploit that grants complete control over the Exchange server. "Considering the level of privilege an attacker can gain through this vulnerability, I would not be surprised to see public exploitation very soon," said Tom Cross, X-Force Researcher at IBM ISS. Microsoft also provided a patch for a vulnerability in the Microsoft Windows Domain Name System (DNS) Server that can trigger a stack-based buffer overflow in the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) interface, granting the attacker system privileges. While this threat is typically mitigated by external firewalls, exploits have been in the wild since April, and it has been used in some cases to propagate the Rinbot Worm. IBM ISS provided protection for this flaw in April. Details can be found at:www.net/threats/260.html.