Use-after-free in Microsoft Office
CVE-2026-45461 is a critical memory-corruption vulnerability in Microsoft Office. The provided content consistently associates the flaw with a use-after-free condition in Office, while some summaries also describe the broader cluster as heap-based buffer overflows. Based on the more specific advisory language, the best-fit classification is a use-after-free vulnerability in Microsoft Office that can lead to local code execution. Microsoft notes that the Preview Pane is an attack vector, indicating that exploitation may be triggered during document rendering without requiring full manual opening of a malicious file in some scenarios. Successful exploitation results in attacker-controlled code execution in the context of the affected system.
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Impact, mitigation & remediation
What it means. What to do now. Patch path, mitigations, and the assume-compromise checklist.
Impact
What an attacker gets, and what they’ve been doing with it.
Mitigation
If you can’t patch tonight, do this now.
Remediation
Patch, then assume compromise.
Exploits
No public exploits tracked yet. Mallory keeps watching.
No public exploit code observed for this vulnerability.
Affected products & vendors
Products and vendors Mallory has correlated with this vulnerability. Open in Mallory to drill down to specific CPE configurations and version ranges.
Vendor-confirmed product mapping. Mallory continuously reconciles this list against your asset inventory.
Recent activity
2 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
One of multiple heap-based buffer overflow vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office that could allow unauthenticated remote code execution.
A critical local code execution vulnerability in Microsoft Office caused by a use-after-free flaw.
The version that knows your environment.
Query your assets running an affected version, and investigate the blast radius.
Every observed campaign linking this CVE to a named adversary.
Malware families riding this exploit, with evidence and IOCs.
YARA, Sigma, Snort, and vendor rules, auto-deployed to your SIEM.
Cross-references every affected SKU, including bundled OEM variants.
Community discussion across Reddit, Mastodon, and other social sources.