Software Engineering Institute

The Microsoft Foundation Class Library (MFC), is a Microsoft library that wraps parts of the Windows API in C++ classes. MFC is included in Microsoft Visual Studio and Microsoft Windows.

Per Microsoft Security Bulletin MS07-012, a memory corruption vulnerability exists in the MFC component that is provided with Microsoft Windows and Visual Studio. An attacker may be able to exploit this vulnerability by convincing a user to open a malformed embedded OLE object within a Rich Text Format (RTF) file.

Note that reports indicate that Visual Studio 2005 and Windows Vista are unaffected by this vulnerability, however Windows Server 2003 is affected.

A remote unauthenticated attacker may be able to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user who is running Windows.

Update
Microsoft has released an update to address this issue. See Microsoft Security Bulletin MS07-012 for more details. This advisory states that the patch is incomplete.

Do not run Windows with administrator privileges

Running Windows using an unprivileged regular user account may mitigate the affects of this vulnerability. See the Microsoft Technet article Applying the Principle of Least Privilege to User Accounts on Windows XP for more information.

Do not allow WordPad to parse embedded files

Microsoft WordPad is the default application for opening and interacting with RTF files in Microsoft Windows. Preventing WordPad from parsing embedded OLE objects in RTF files may partially mitigate this vulnerability. See the workarounds section of Microsoft Security Bulletin MS07-012 for instructions on how to edit the Windows registry to prevent WordPad from parsing these objects.