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New updates are now being offered by Office 365 provider Microsoft (News - Alert) for recent versions of Office for Mac – such as a security patch for malware and upgrades to Outlook, according to news reports.

For example, AppleInsider reported that the Office for Mac 2011 14.2.5 update corrects "extremely important issues and also helps improve security." Also, Mac Observer said that Microsoft released “critical updates” for Office for Mac – related to security issues in productivity suites, and fixes to bugs.

The Office 2008 for Mac 12.3.5 update improves security, according to Microsoft support. It fixes flaws “that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory with malicious code,” the company said in a statement.

Previously, a flaw was found in the software where memory could be over-written with malicious code if someone opened crafted Excel files. There were also improvements made to Outlook as in the past automatic configuration was not working in Outlook.com accounts.

Moreover, another correction dealt with importing data from a .PST file. Attachments were missing from messages after being imported in Outlook for Mac, while some distribution lists were not recognized and could not be expanded.Another issue is related to Gmail in Mac Outlook 2011 14.2 and later versions, when a duplicate message was put in the All Mails folder.

Luckily, all of these bugs and flaws have now been fixed.

In other security issues related to Office 365, customers in both North and South America experienced an eight-hour outage of their Office 365 Exchange Online service on Nov. 8, TMCnet said. Another outage took place on Nov. 13, which lasted for over five hours.

Rajesh Jha, a Microsoft vice president, revealed the company issued service credits to customers impacted by the outages.

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