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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2008-4837

Severity High
Score 9.3/10

Summary

Stack-based buffer overflow in Microsoft Office Word 2000 SP3, 2002 SP3, 2003 SP3, and 2007 Gold and SP1; Word Viewer 2003 Gold and SP3; Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 File Formats Gold and SP1; and Microsoft Works 8 allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via a crafted Word document that contains a malformed table property, which triggers memory corruption, aka "Word Memory Corruption Vulnerability."

  • MEDIUM
  • NETWORK
  • NONE
  • COMPLETE
  • COMPLETE
  • COMPLETE

CWE-119 - Buffer Overflow

Buffer overflow attacks involve data transit and operations exceeding the restricted memory buffer, thereby corrupting or overwriting data in adjacent memory locations. Such overflow allows the attacker to run arbitrary code or manipulate the existing code to cause privilege escalation, data breach, denial of service, system crash and even complete system compromise. Given that languages such as C and C++ lack default safeguards against overwriting or accessing data in their memory, applications utilizing these languages are most susceptible to buffer overflows attacks.

References

Advisory Timeline

  • Published