Security News > 2020 > May > U.S. Government Issues Alert on Most Exploited Vulnerabilities
Several Microsoft Office vulnerabilities that were patched years ago continue to be among the security flaws most exploited in attacks, the U.S. government warns.
The bugs, the alert underlines, are routinely exploited by foreign cyber actors in attacks targeting both the public and private sectors, and risks associated with them could be mitigated "Through an increased effort to patch systems and implement programs to keep system patching up to date."
Between 2016 and 2019, threat actors mainly attempted to compromise systems through vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office, Apache Struts, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft.
The three vulnerabilities that state-sponsored threat actors from China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia are abusing most frequently impact Microsoft Office and have been patched long ago: CVE-2017-11882, CVE-2017-0199, and CVE-2012-0158.
"According to U.S. Government technical analysis, malicious cyber actors most often exploited vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding technology. OLE allows documents to contain embedded content from other applications such as spreadsheets. After OLE the second-most-reported vulnerable technology was a widespread Web framework known as Apache Struts," the alert reads.
News URL
Related Vulnerability
| DATE | CVE | VULNERABILITY TITLE | RISK |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2017-11-15 | CVE-2017-11882 | Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer vulnerability in Microsoft Office Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 3, Microsoft Office 2010 Service Pack 2, Microsoft Office 2013 Service Pack 1, and Microsoft Office 2016 allow an attacker to run arbitrary code in the context of the current user by failing to properly handle objects in memory, aka "Microsoft Office Memory Corruption Vulnerability". | 7.8 |
| 2017-04-12 | CVE-2017-0199 | Microsoft Office 2007 SP3, Microsoft Office 2010 SP2, Microsoft Office 2013 SP1, Microsoft Office 2016, Microsoft Windows Vista SP2, Windows Server 2008 SP2, Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8.1 allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via a crafted document, aka "Microsoft Office/WordPad Remote Code Execution Vulnerability w/Windows API." | 7.8 |
| 2012-04-10 | CVE-2012-0158 | Code Injection vulnerability in Microsoft products The (1) ListView, (2) ListView2, (3) TreeView, and (4) TreeView2 ActiveX controls in MSCOMCTL.OCX in the Common Controls in Microsoft Office 2003 SP3, 2007 SP2 and SP3, and 2010 Gold and SP1; Office 2003 Web Components SP3; SQL Server 2000 SP4, 2005 SP4, and 2008 SP2, SP3, and R2; BizTalk Server 2002 SP1; Commerce Server 2002 SP4, 2007 SP2, and 2009 Gold and R2; Visual FoxPro 8.0 SP1 and 9.0 SP2; and Visual Basic 6.0 Runtime allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via a crafted (a) web site, (b) Office document, or (c) .rtf file that triggers "system state" corruption, as exploited in the wild in April 2012, aka "MSCOMCTL.OCX RCE Vulnerability." | 8.8 |