Microsoft issued an emergency patch for a high-severity zero-day vulnerability in Office that allows attackers to bypass document security checks and is being exploited in the wild via malicious files.
Microsoft pushed the emergency patch for the zero‑day, tracked as CVE-2026-21509, and classified it as a “Microsoft Office Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability” with a CVSS score of 7.8 out of 10. The flaw allows attackers to bypass Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) mitigations that are designed to block unsafe COM/OLE controls inside Office documents. This means a malicious attachment could infect a PC despite built-in protections.
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Source: Malwarebytes Labs
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