The CVE-2023-21716 vulnerability in Microsoft Office’s wwlib library can lead to remote code execution on the victim’s system with the privileges of the user who opens a malicious RTF document.
The vulnerability affects several versions of Microsoft Office, including the latest Insider Preview of Office 365 and Office 2016, as well as Office 2013, 2010, and 2007.
While Microsoft Office 2010 and later versions have a Protected View feature that can help limit the damage caused by malicious documents, it is not enough to fully protect against this vulnerability as an additional sandbox escape vulnerability is required to gain full privileges.
t is also ineffective to remove the file association for the RTF extension as the vulnerable code can still be reached using the DOC extension.
Microsoft has released a security patch to address this vulnerability and advises all affected users to install it as soon as possible to prevent exploitation by attackers.