Quote:A researcher has identified a serious remote code execution vulnerability affecting the LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice open-source productivity suites, but a patch has only been released for the former.

Researcher Alex Inführ discovered that a malicious actor could use specially crafted documents to execute arbitrary code without any warning message being seen by the victim. All the targeted user needs to do is open a malicious ODT file and move the mouse anywhere over the document.

The expert has published a blog post detailing his findings and a video showing how the attack works. While the post and proof-of-concept (PoC) code focus on LibreOffice, the attack can be adapted for OpenOffice as well. Inführ says both Linux and Windows systems are impacted.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-16858, has been described as a path traversal issue that allows an attacker to execute a Python file located anywhere on the targeted system. The attack is made easier by the fact that Python is bundled with LibreOffice and OpenOffice, which means the attacker does not need to worry about this component being installed on the targeted device.