Home > News

Microsoft Office Update Remedies Chinese Hack Vulnerability

By Laura Tucker
Microsoft Office Hack Vulnerability Featured

Microsoft Office users are encouraged to update the software as soon as possible to protect their systems from a Chinese hack vulnerability. While Microsoft has known about the threat since late last month, it only initially offered workarounds.

Also read: Microsoft Bug Allows Unsupported PCs to Upgrade to Windows 11

Microsoft Office Threat

Details of the Microsoft Office hack vulnerability were initially shared on Twitter. The TA413 cybercriminal group inserted the vulnerability into Word documents, then made them appear to originate from the Tibetan government in exile in India. TA413 is assumed to be linked to the Chinese government.

Known to be an “advanced persistent threat,” they’ve targeted the exiled community before. A 2019 Citizen Lab report showed Tibetan politicians as the subjects of spyware attacks through browsers and WhatsApp. A Firefox extension was used to spy on the Tibetan political figures in at least one instance.

Microsoft Office Hack Vulnerability Modern
Image source: Unsplash

Follina, the new Microsoft Office vulnerability, was made public on May 27. Nao Sec security researchers tweeted about results from the malware scanning website VirusTotal. The tweet explained that the malicious code that was discovered traveled via Word docs, then sent commands through PowerShell.

Nao Sec tweeted, “Interesting maldoc was submitted from Belarus. It uses Word’s external link to load the HTML and then uses the ‘ms-msdt’ scheme to execute PowerShell code,” adding a VirusTotal link.

Researcher Kevin Beaumont included more details in a blog post. He described that Follina allowed the malicious Word doc to remotely load HTML files, then used MSDT to carry out the PowerShell commands.

Microsoft Office Hack Vulnerability Future
Image source: Unsplash

Microsoft responded in a blog post that the CVE-2022-30190 vulnerability (Follina) had the power to install programs, access data, modify or delete data, and create new user accounts.

It’s assumed that all users of Microsoft Office 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, Office ProPlus, and Office 365 are at risk due to the Follina vulnerability.

Microsoft Issues Security Update

Microsoft issued workarounds initially, and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency recommended that system administrators utilize the workarounds in lieu of a solution.

Microsoft Office Hack Vulnerability Book
Image source: Unsplash

On June 15, Microsoft issued a security update to close the loophole. It urged users of Windows 7 and up to update right away. Microsoft urged Windows 10 users to install update KB5014699 and Windows 11 users to install update KB5014697.

“Microsoft strongly recommends that customers install the updates to be fully protected from the vulnerability,” wrote Microsoft. “Customers whose systems are configured to receive automatic updates do not need to take any further action.”

Learn what to do if Windows Security isn’t opening.

Image credit: Unsplash

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

When the SS Great Eastern laid the first working transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, a message that had taken ten days by steamship suddenly crossed the ocean in minutes, and the financial markets of London and New York were forced, within a single trading week, to invent the modern concept of synchronised global price.
From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.