Earlier today, Microsoft announced in a security advisory that it was seeing evidence of attacks targeted against certain versions of its flagship word processing software.

The vulnerability can be exploited using a specially-crafted RTF file. Opening such a file can give the attacker full access to the user’s computer.

According to Microsoft, Word 2003, 2007, 2010, and 2013 are all affected. Since Word is the default editor in Outlook, simply opening an affected email can lead to a successful attack.

Microsoft is working on a patch, but until it’s ready, their advice is to install and configure EMET. They are also providing the usual ‘Fix It‘ stopgap, which in this case just disables the ability to open RTF files in Word.

There’s a less technical overview of this issue over at the MSRC blog.

This vulnerability is identified as CVE-2014-1761.