Vulnerability Spotlight: TALOS-2017-0430/0431: Multiple Vulnerabilities in FreeXL Library

Talos has discovered two remote code execution vulnerabilities in the the FreeXL library. FreeXL is an open source C library to extract valid data from within an Excel (.xls) spreadsheet. Exploiting these vulnerabilities can potentially allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the victim’s machine. If an attacker builds a specially crafted XLS (Excel) file and the victim opens it with an application using the FreeXL library, the attackers code will be executed with the privileges of the local user.