During the most recent Patch Tuesday, Microsoft slipped in a very important update for Microsoft Office for Mac. Microsoft’s description is as follows:

This update fixes a vulnerability that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer’s memory with malicious code.

If you’re not much into security lingo, let me translate this to

An unpatched Office 2004 installation on a Mac could allow a hacker to execute code of their choosing on your system remotely (i.e., across an open network).

In reality, this isn’t as bad as it may seem since most computer users are behind a home router which offers some protection from Internet based attacks. The one caveat would be open ports in the router which lets unsolicited traffic onto your network. Regardless, I do recommend that you go ahead and install this patch. You can find more details about the patch and the link to the download it at either Microsoft or Apple’s website.

I do realize that a fairly small number of computer users actually own a Mac and that only a percentage of Mac users have Microsoft Office installed. Nonetheless, this patch is a critical update that I wanted to make sure my readers were aware of.