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Improper Restriction of Operations within the Bounds of a Memory Buffer

CVE-2015-6038

Severity High
Score 9.3/10

Summary

Microsoft Excel 2007 SP3, Excel 2010 SP2, Excel 2013 SP1, Excel 2013 RT SP1, Excel 2016, Excel for Mac 2011, Excel 2016 for Mac, Office Compatibility Pack SP3, Excel Viewer, and Excel Services on SharePoint Server 2007 SP3, 2010 SP2, and 2013 SP1 allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via a crafted Office document, aka "Microsoft Office 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