Holes in PowerPoint and Excel

jeffy124 writes: "Looks like it's time for IIS and Outlook to make room on the pedestal of security holes. Just about every recent version of PowerPoint and Excel are vulnerable to being taken over to control the system remotely. The hole is a macro-related, as it's possible to bypass asking the user if they'd like a macro to run. Microsoft's advisory can be found here." Funny. I always thought that PowerPoint was already at least as destructive as macro viruses to corporate productivity. You ever watch a suit fiddle with his presentation?

Comments

Re:This hole could be in more versions that listed

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Maybe something like recording keystrokes, but I was pretty sure there was no VBA in PowerPoint 95 and 97. The macro languages in Word and Excel were also incompatabile because of minor differences in each. At least for the 95 version. In the 95 version, there was WordBasic for Word (subset of VB) and VBA in Excel (Visual Basic for Applications...another subset of VB). In Office 2000 (it could be 97, but I thought it was 2000) everything got a compatible macro language. Thus the recent blossoming of macro virii. Personally, I have PowerPoint installed, but don't use it much. Only people I have ever seen use this are suits and sales monkey's.

Somebody tell the suits what this costs

[BroadbandBradley]

I work for a BIG company, (fortune 500) that runs MS Exchange server for mail. We recently upgraded from 95 to 2000 just a few months ago. (support for our working Win95 system having been discontinued by MS) The overhead created by all the security stuff running on the network has created lots of problems. Email is no longer 'realtimeish' meaning it may take 1/2 hour to recieve a message sent across our network. When right clicking in my browser window, it takes about 5 seconds for a menu to open (pentium III 500 128meg ram). My home pc runs Linux, and outperfoms my work computer at about half the hardware (PII 266)
IT has been trying to figure out how to fix the mail delays for a few months now with no progress, and I don't think they even care that it takes me so long to perform functions in the browser, but most of my work is done in web-based tools. MS has the world by the nuts, and they're milking us all!!! at least in my home I still have a choice.