Security, et al

Microsoft just released an official advisory on this vulnerability and the advisory contains 2 good recommendations you might consider to mitigate the threat until Patch Tuesday:

1) Use the Word Viewer to view documents since the viewer isn’t vulnerable. For this recommendation to work you would need concientious cooperation from your users.

2) Run Word in safe mode. Since you can accomplish this change via group policy it’s a bit more interesting. Microsoft documents the many registry keys necessary for changing all the places necessary to make sure Word runs in safe mode and provides links to documentation on creating custom Administrative Templates. But unfortunately they stop short of just creating the template. Why should countless admins do have to code and test this individually?

Here’s the advisory link: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/919637.mspx.

Hopefully your AV vendor has already provided updated signatures for catching affected word documents. If your AV technology covers the likely infection vectors you may just wait until the patch is available instead of trying to implement these workarounds.