Analyzing Microsoft Office exploits

While Microsoft Office is associated mainly with Windows by many people, it has also supported the macOS operating system for several decades. In addition, the file formats used by it are also understandable by various other suits, such as Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice. In this section, we will have a look at vulnerabilities that can be exploited by malformed documents in order to perform malicious actions and learn how to analyze them.

File structures

The first thing that should be clear when analyzing any exploit is how files associated with them are actually structured. Let's take a look at the most common file formats associated with Microsoft Office and used by attackers to store and...