Think about this for a while; you bought one of the most expensive word-processors on the market, someone finds a flaw, and the company who sold you the software says; just dont open any documents you get send to you from someone you do not know. This is however the advise Microsoft gives to its users of Word and not just an old version. So if you are using:

Microsoft Word 2000
Microsoft Word 2002
Microsoft Word 2003
Microsoft Word Viewer 2003
Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac
Microsoft Word 2004 v. X for Mac
Microsoft Works 2004
Microsoft Works 2005
Microsoft Works 2006

Be aware of the following Security Advisorie (source: FrSIRT) :

A vulnerability has been identified in Microsoft Word, which could be exploited by attackers to take complete control of an affected system. This flaw is due to a memory corruption error when handling a malformed document, which could be exploited by attackers to execute arbitrary commands by tricking a user into opening a specially crafted Word document.

Note : This zero-day vulnerability is currently being exploited in the wild.

Now the wait is for Microsoft to come with a patch, till that time, you might want to switch to Openoffice ? Well atleast for the time it takes…

Because Novell will implement the posibility to work with word-documents within openoffice. According to c|net:

Novell said Monday it is participating in an open-source project designed to bridge rival document formats and thus enable its OpenOffice.org customers to work with Microsoft Office documents.

Just a reason to think twice about cross-breading, we don’t want clones either, so why we want all our software packages to be depending so much on eachother?