<p>A rare critical Microsoft Word vulnerability was patched today by Microsoft, one of seven security updates pushed out repairing 11 flaws in its December security update.</p><p>The Word vulnerability earned a critical rating because the Outlook email client uses Word to display documents in the Outlook preview pane and therefore removes the need for user interaction to trigger an exploit.</p><p>Generally, remote execution flaws in Office products don't warrant critical ratings because they require some kind of action from the user. An attacker could also trick a user into visiting a website hosting a malicious RTF file or advertisement, for example, which would exploit the vulnerability.</p><p>The vulnerability occurs in the way Office parses specially crafted Rich Text Format messages, the Microsoft advisory said.</p><p><a href="http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/microsoft-patches-critical-remote-flaws-word-ie-and-windows-121112">Keep reading...</a></p><p>Read also:</p><p><a href="http://www.itpro.co.uk/644611/windows-rt-joins-the-patch-tuesday-party">Windows RT joins the Patch Tuesday party</a> (IT PRO)</p><p>Explore: <a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?ncl=d1EcXKyTxr91IwMNhSdeZI7-LTBYM&ned=us">319 additional articles.</a></p>