BleepingComputer reports that a tweet-sized proof-of-concept exploit has been released by security researcher Joshua Drake for a critical Microsoft Word flaw, tracked as CVE-2023-21716, which could be leveraged for remote code execution.
Such a vulnerability, which was identified by Drake within Microsoft Office's "wwlib.dll" and has been addressed by Microsoft in last month's Patch Tuesday, could enable both remote and arbitrary code execution, according to Drake, who showed the heap corruption issue in the PoC.
No evidence has been found to suggest ongoing active exploitation of the flaw, with Microsoft downplaying the possibility of an attack leveraging the bug. Aside from patches, Microsoft has also offered workarounds for the bug, including email reading in plain text format and the activation of the Microsoft Office File Block policy although the latter could prove challenging.
"If you use Registry Editor incorrectly, you may cause serious problems that may require you to reinstall your operating system," said Microsoft.
Included in the exposed dataset labeled "PDL" were individuals' full names, email addresses, phone numbers, location data, professional summaries, and skills, as well as education and employment histories.
Attackers could leverage the issue — which impacts Nexus 3000, 7000, and 9000 series switches with vulnerable NX-OS versions with DHCPv6 activated and are in standalone NX-OS mode — to facilitate continuous crashes of the dhcp_snoop process and a denial-of-service condition.
Higher rewards of up to $250,000 will be given by Google for the discovery of memory corruption flaws in the Chrome browser shown to achieve remote code execution using a non-sandboxed process as part of a more robust vulnerability reward program.