CVE-2006-1540

Status: ModifiedHigh (9.3)—💥 Exploit

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.

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NOTE: after the initial disclosure, this issue was demonstrated by triggering an integer overflow using an inconsistent size for a Unicode "Sheet Name" string.

CVSS

Version: 2.0
Vector: AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:C/I:C/A:C
Base score: 9.3

Exploitation probability (EPSS)

Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days: 29%
Percentile among all scored CVEs: 98
Score date: 10/12/2026

EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System, FIRST) estimates how likely a vulnerability is to be exploited in the wild within 30 days. It complements CVSS (impact) and CISA KEV (confirmed exploitation).

💥 Public exploits

Exploit code or detection templates are publicly available. This is not the same as confirmed active exploitation (KEV), but it raises the risk: patch with priority.

Published on Exploit-DB · Microsoft Office Products - Array Index Bounds Error (PoC) (3/27/2006)

Affected technologies (1)

Microsoft — Office

CWEs

CWE-94

References

Raw JSON (NVD)

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