Some developers forked OpenOffice and created LibreOffice. While some of these fears turned to reality (with Oracle dumping OpenSolaris), the database giant plans for were not so clear and the office suite future seemed in danger. SecurityWeek has reached out to OpenOffice developers for comment and will update this article if they respond.When SUN was acquired by Oracle, the open source community was afraid that Oracle kills SUN's open source software, which included, OpenSolaris, MySQL, etc. Until a fix becomes available, users can disable Python support by removing or renaming the pythonscript.py file in the installation folder. OpenOffice developers have also been alerted, but they have yet to release a patch. The issue was reported to LibreOffice developers on October 18, 2018, and it was fixed less than two weeks later with the release of versions 6.0.7 and 6.1.3. The victim only sees a blank page, but the malicious code gets executed when they move their mouse over it. In the demo created by Inführ, the color of the link has been set to white and the link covers an entire page in the document. Using the onmouseover event, a piece of malware present on the system can be executed when the victim hovers over the link, without raising any suspicion. The malicious document needs to contain a specially crafted link pointing to a Python method from a script. The attack is made easier by the fact that Python is bundled with LibreOffice and OpenOffice, which means the attacker does not need to worry about this component being installed on the targeted device. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-16858, has been described as a path traversal issue that allows an attacker to execute a Python file located anywhere on the targeted system.

Inführ says both Linux and Windows systems are impacted. While the post and proof-of-concept (PoC) code focus on LibreOffice, the attack can be adapted for OpenOffice as well. The expert has published a blog post detailing his findings and a video showing how the attack works.

All the targeted user needs to do is open a malicious ODT file and move the mouse anywhere over the document. Researcher Alex Inführ discovered that a malicious actor could use specially crafted documents to execute arbitrary code without any warning message being seen by the victim. A researcher has identified a serious remote code execution vulnerability affecting the LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice open-source productivity suites, but a patch has only been released for the former.

Openoffice or libreoffice 2018