As the world’s most popular productivity suite, Microsoft Office tends to receive much attention from cybercriminals. Generally, hackers embed malware in authentic Office files to trick users into unleashing it onto their machines. However, the most recent exploit proves to be much more dangerous than any Office hack we’ve seen.

What’s the new Office threat?
The Office exploit takes advantage of Microsoft’s Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE), a protocol that sends messages and data between applications. For example, DDE can be used to automatically update a table in a Word document with data collected in an Excel spreadsheet.

The problem with this is hackers can create DDE-enabled documents that link to malicious sources rather than to other Office apps. Theoretically, this allows hackers to launch scripts that download Trojan viruses from the internet and execute it before the user is even aware of the attack.

And unlike most malware-embedded Office files…