Yesterday's patch from Microsoft addressed a severe issue that had been identified in PowerPoint. Though we all know the importance of keeping our systems up to date, every now and then Microsoft issues a public reminder, particularly when a flaw is exceptionally dangerous and actively being exploited. According to Redmond, that's the case with their most recently fixed flaw. The company has announced that the PowerPoint flaw is being actively exploited in the field, using tainted PowerPoint files to infect people's machines.
Microsoft has not mentioned how widespread they believe infections from this security flaw to be, but one security vendor, Symantec, believes the cases to be limited. It's somewhat of a concern to users of Office on the Mac, as the flaw remains open on that platform. It is rare for Microsoft to openly announce how dangerous a flaw is, so this one must have been particularly troublesome for the software giant.