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

Macros and scripting

[Alsee]

Hasn't anyone at Microsoft noticed yet that macros and scripting are a very dangerous features? They are executable code! They should be avoided if possible. When implemented they should have restricted functionality (why the hell does a macro need to be able to delete files?!?), and they need to be scrutinized for bugs and holes more closely than almost any other piece of code.

Educate the users

[Red Aardvark House]

At my job, the IT tech gave instructions to all users to disable macros on all incoming attachments in Excel and Word, or not to even open them at all if they're not sure.

It's not foolproof but it does make the people at my job aware of one of the many ways that viruses are spread.

This hole could be in more versions that listed!

[Troed]

Taken from Microsofts website:

Tested Versions:
Microsoft tested the following products to assess whether they are affected by these vulnerabilities. Previous versions are no longer supported, and may or may not be affected by these vulnerabilities.

Office 98 for Macintosh

Office 2001 for Macintosh

Office 2000 for Windows

Office 2002 for Windows

Do note - just because older versions aren't supported Microsoft won't check if the whole is there!

Emacs security flaws.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Emacs does include some features that are equivalent to these sort of macros. They are disabled by default

And they used to be enabled by default - which was a big vulnerability if you used them as a mail reader or netnews reader. A simple string embedded in the letter or posting could do anything YOU could do in emacs - which means anything you could do from a shell, too.

Fortunately the first well-known public exploit was a netnews posting demoing the bug by popping up a window and telling you how to turn it off. The default was changed in the next release.

The days of the MIT AI lab were a more innocent time. To keep the students from crashing the machine they made it trivial - with a well-documented command to do it. The idea being that if there were no reputation points to be earned by "finding a way to crash the machine" but lots of negative ones to be had by annoying the other students, everybody would get bored with it quickly. Stallman continued the tradition later by having no root password on his personal machine for quite a while.

Unfortunately, about one person in a hundred (one in 50 to one in 200) is a psychopath - a person with a brain problem analogous to color blindness that amounts to "no concience". Some fraction of these don't compensate by learning that hurting others is bad for number one and becoming "good" by deliberate effort.

So when you have hundreds of millions of people on the internet, you end up with a few "black hat" hackers and a host of script kiddies. So the days of innocence (and Stallman's open root account) are long over.

Now internet-connected computers hold information of value that can be stolen and run mission-critical functions for businesses with cutthroat competitors. So a management order to install mass-market stoftware with a history of well-known major security holes has graduated from administrative cluelessness to a severe breach of fiduciary duty.