Security News > 2022 > May > Microsoft Releases Workarounds for Office Vulnerability Under Active Exploitation

Microsoft on Monday published guidance for a newly discovered zero-day security flaw in its Office productivity suite that could be exploited to achieve code execution on affected systems.

Microsoft Office versions Office 2013, Office 2016, Office 2019, and Office 2021, as well as Professional Plus editions, are impacted.

"A remote code execution vulnerability exists when MSDT is called using the URL protocol from a calling application such as Word," Microsoft said in an advisory for CVE-2022-30190.

Besides releasing detection rules for Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, the Redmond-based company has offered workarounds in its guidance to disable the MSDT URL protocol via a Windows Registry modification.

"If the calling application is a Microsoft Office application, by default, Microsoft Office opens documents from the internet in Protected View or Application Guard for Office, both of which prevent the current attack," Microsoft said.

This is not the first time Microsoft Office protocol schemes like "Ms-msdt:" have come under the scanner for their potential misuse.

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