Microsoft acknowledged on Tuesday that its popular Office applications for the Macintosh have a critical security flaw that leaves users' systems open to attack by worms and online vandals. The software slip-up happens because the Microsoft applications incorrectly handle the input to a certain HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) feature. By formatting a link in a particular manner, an attacker can cause a program to crash a Macintosh or run arbitrary commands. The link could appear on a Web page or in an HTML-enabled e-mail.
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