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Fencer Vulns
critical 9.3

CVE-2006-1540 in the critical feed json

MSO.DLL in Microsoft Office 2000, Office XP (2002), and Office 2003 allows user-assisted attackers to cause a denial of service and execute…

published 2006-03-30 20 y ago modified 2026-06-16 4 mo ago also EUVD-2006-1544

cvss
9.3
version 2.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
28.6%
EPSS 28.6% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 98%
public exploits
1
Exploit-DB

Summary

MSO.DLL in Microsoft Office 2000, Office XP (2002), and Office 2003 allows user-assisted attackers to cause a denial of service and execute arbitrary code via multiple attack vectors, as originally demonstrated using a crafted document record with a malformed string, as demonstrated by replacing a certain "01 00 00 00" byte sequence with an "FF FF FF FF" byte sequence, possibly causing an invalid array index, in (1) an Excel .xls document, which triggers an access violation in ole32.dll; (2) an Excel .xlw document, which triggers an access violation in excel.exe; (3) a Word document, which triggers an access violation in mso.dll in winword.exe; and (4) a PowerPoint document, which triggers an access violation in powerpnt.txt. NOTE: after the initial disclosure, this issue was demonstrated by triggering an integer overflow using an inconsistent size for a Unicode "Sheet Name" string.

Timeline

  1. First public exploit (EDB-1615)
  2. Published

Exploit prediction

28.63% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 98% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

Exploits and checks

  • EDB-1615 Microsoft Office Products - Array Index Bounds Error (PoC) dos, 2006-03-27
  • securityfocus.com http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/17252 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified
  • securitytracker.com http://securitytracker.com/id?1015855 referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 2.0 9.3 AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:C/I:C/A:C

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-94 Improper Control of Generation of Code

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.