Latin America cyberattacks exploit 2017 Microsoft Office flaws

A report from ESET Latinoamérica reveals that cyberattacks in the region during the first half of 2026 heavily relied on outdated software. Specifically, over 81.8% of exploits targeting software vulnerabilities utilized two Microsoft Office flaws that have been known since 2017.

The most prevalent vulnerability, CVE-2017-0199, accounted for 58.3% of the exploits, while CVE-2017-11882, a memory corruption flaw in the Microsoft Equation Editor, represented 23.5%. This indicates a significant reliance on malicious documents in RTF and DOC formats to exploit unpatched applications.

In terms of overall threat types, phishing and social engineering were the most frequent, averaging 23.66% of alerts. Malicious downloaders followed at 14.94%, while backdoors and remote access trojans (RATs) averaged 4.83%. Although ransomware accounted for only 0.28% of the total volume of alerts, ESET noted its high strategic and financial impact on business continuity.