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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?
This vuln. works on Mac Office 2001 (and 98) too.
It does work.
it's in my head
Customers using Microsoft® Excel or PowerPoint for Windows® or Macintosh® I guess Mac uses can stop complaining that they don't get all the features of the Windows version.
Is this really a surprise? I was under the impression, that all macro-enabled applications under windows (office suite) shared such vulnerabilities, because they most probably use the same scripting engine.
;)
One exploit serves all
-- The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
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.
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
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.
I like fire ants. They are very spicy!
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!
it's in my head
Is the hole exploitable in Mac OS X? Does the unix architecture and security prevent this from being a problem?
If a story about a vulnerability in Microsoft created software is considered news.:)
My other sig is extremely clever...
These things first appeared in 1996 or so. Word.Concept or what was it called. Microsoft responded by disabling the AutoLoad macro (or whatever it's called). Now somebody found a new way to make Excel/etc. execute stuff when loading a file. Big deal.
I wonder why virus writes bother at all. They can just put a button labeled "Click here" on the page, and 95% of the lusers will click it. The only defense against that is just disabling all macro support. And everybody knows that isn't going to happen.
" 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?"
Funny
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
This does not seem to be a problem unique to Miscrosoft Office. Wouldn't this type of security hole be possible in any office suite with scripting/macro capabilities? Do KOffice or StarOffice not support macros (I've never used them, so I don't know)?
Kudos to MSFT for making a patch immediately available, but I must say that MSFT's constantly having to play catch-up with secuirty holes does not make me real confident in .NET's data safeguard capabilities.
I was attending a presentation by some state officials last week. The presenter's Powerpoint presentation was set to autoadvance every 30 seconds or so and apparently they couldn't make it stop, so she had an assistant sit at the computer and backup the slide everytime it jumped ahead prematurely.
So who else has watched someone by victimized by powerpoint? Add your anectdote as a reply.
Outlook/IIS have many holes; it is very rare that someone has bothered to write a worm that uses them. I personally won't be holding my breath for these exploits to be used in one. You aren't a reporter or AV person are you?
That Microsoft advisory states that Macintosh versions are affected, yes. I doubt the OS matters much with viruses that rely on a macro language within an application rather than using the OS itself or its services to propagate.
Powerpoint is about the only part of Microsoft Office worth keeping around. It used to be a mac app made by a third party, and for making up posters on Windows with a shoestring budget, you can't top it.
More than Word or Excel, Powerpoint is the killer app for office. Once Linux makes up something as tidy, fast and easy to use, corporate acceptance will go through the roof, just BECAUSE suits like to spend time playing with their slides.
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
If you have Office 97 or 95, their should be no Powerpoint hole because powerpoint does not have macros until Office 2000 and then Office XP. Just checked the help file cuz I happen to have Office 95 (it does what I want and is not as bloated as the new stuff....it's still bloated, just not as bloated as the latest stuff....).
Gork
Gorkman
Others have said it in the past, and I'm starting to believe it more myself. I really think that many at large companies use default installs of Office as job security. No one can blame them entirely if there's a problem - after all, the IT guys themselves didn't write the viruses. Failing to keep up with patches released months earlier can be cause for problems, but if a virus just came out recently, or there's just no patch for it, then "It's not my fault!" is a very valid point.
The 'job security' aspect comes in because *someone* has to go around and patch every machine. *Someone* has to go round and install/test new virus software. I think it's past being 'common knowledge' that *by default* most MS products install themselves pretty insecurely. So someone has to learn about how to lock down those products - then actually do it. It's job security, choosing products which you KNOW will require you to always be updating them.
Yeah, I'm a bit overly cynical about this. I've met some people who really just think this is how computers are supposed to be - you're always playing 'catch up' to virus writers. The concept of prevention to them is installing the latest 'Norton' utility. Proactively analyzing the systems they have for potential vulnerabilities (turn off scripting on machines that don't need it, etc) just doesn't occur to them.
I'll be the first to admit that StarOffice/OpenOffice have not been up to snuff in the past, and even the current versions may not be up to snuff for everyone, but they're getting better. SO6 and the next OO may in fact be solid enough to let *many* in an organization use those as their primary or only Office applications, and let the few people that need the MS-specific features keep using MS Office. Yes, there'd be some relearning costs - figure that gets covered by the savings in upgrade licensing for those people.
creation science book
I did a presentation skills course. One of the
rules was not to use slides at all
unless you really need them.
You simply don't need a slide that says we sold
100 000 units if you can just tell them.
Powerpoint - like a lot of modern software -
reverses this rule by making th euser subordinate to
the software.
Sun needs to get StarOffice 6.0 out the door NOW. Do it while Microsoft keeps getting bad press. I'm a Network Admin at a company with 200 employees and the guys before me never kept licensing info. So, I'm doing a license audit right now. We're either going to be buying a lot of Microsoft Office licenses, or looking for an alternative. I sure wouldn't mind bringing up StarOffice, if a real usable and supported version was out there.
With the recent change in MS licensing policy NOW is the time for Sun to act and get their product in the door..
Not to burst your bubble, but don't forget that Redhat (and many other linux distributions) install with numerous remote root holes. The solution problem is not germane to Microsoft. (You might successfully argue it is a result of poor administration, though.)
I know it's popular to bash Powerpoint, but I have to say that's one product without any acceptable replacements on the linux side. ("Impress" does not.
You know, I think that if the former versions aren't vulnerable, they're not gonna tell you. They just can't take the risk to have people want to revert to older versions on the basis that they "work better", not when their business relies so much on people upgrading over and over...
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
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?
How does that hurt productivity? You seem to be implying that the suit would be doing something productive if he weren't using PowerPoint.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
All of us DO know that Micro$oft's programs are full of bugs and security holes, but I don't think we should post every security hole on slashdot. Everyone know that M$ sucks, but please: don't post more stuff like this and concentrate on improving whatever is your open source operating system (Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, etc.) because they have security holes too.
The opinions in this comment are subject to GPL, you can copy, modify and redistribute freely (as in speech).
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.
Gorkman
Come on, Powerpoint is the de facto standard.. Don't expect millions of business users to jump through hoops just because 'M$ sux0rs'
Unfortunatly, you ahave a point. Apparently, the billions of dollars wasted on cleanup after the MS exploit of the day haven't convinced enough people.
Perhaps macro viruses need to touch on corperate hotbutton issues in order for the suits to start thinking.
Perhaps the sexual harassment virus. You get it and it starts sending sexually harrasing email to your coworkers. If done well, the courts could be tied up for decades.
The IP virus, looks for documents containing trade secrets, and quietly posts them to random usenet groups.
Porn virus: Quietly downloads porn into your browser cache. Bonus points if the porn is illegal where you live.
Carnivore virus. Sends suspicious emails to the targets of FBI investigations.
Rootkit virus: Deploys a rootkit from your machine against a bank or government website. Instant felony.
Please note! I don't condone any of these, I just recognise that so far the holes in MS products have been used primarily for childish pranks rather than for real damage.
The least MS could do is at least TRY to limit the damage by putting macros in some sort of sandbox.
I could rant on and on, but I'm not going to because, in fact, there just are no words to say how braindead this is.
This sig under construction. Please check back later.
The most amazing thing of all these virii it that they all exist only due to one (and no more than one) function in the whole VBA language:
- CopyMacro
Maybe it has another name today, but it means exactly the same, copy a macro from a document to another. THAT'S AMAZING!!! Erradicating all these dam virii is much more easy to erradicate malaria from a non-tropical country, kill all the vectors.That's wright we don't even need to kill the vector, all we need is to avoid the vectors to infect the host. This dam macro must not exist anymore!!!
Simple as that, and M$ doesn't seems to want to solve the problem.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
what makes a macro hidden? is it a malformed tag?
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
Be forwarned, though, that even WindowsUpdate doesn't list ALL of the patches that are out.
...and students, engineers, IT management, teachers, , researchers, training staff, etc.
Just because you haven't seen people use PowerPoint doesn't mean that it doesn't get used. I can't help that your job/experiences don't include presenting/being presented information to/from others.
Good presentation software is invaluable to business and education. Just because some people waste hours with screen swipes, cheesy clip-art, and other useless crap doesn't mean that it's not useful. Once I have my content finalized, I can whip up a decent looking presentation in PowerPoint in about 1/2 hour... faster than I could ever do it by hand.
Keeping
Does OpenOffice support a scripting similar to the macros in MSOffice ? If so would it be possible to see similar issues with OpenOffice as well ?
It may not be as bad on Linux/Unix because of the user processes not getting access privilages to do anything nsty, but OpenOffice has a windows version as well.
If there is a sizable installed base of OpenOffice , then maybe you can imagine OpenOffice script worms doing annoying stuff with user files/mails.
And if your friendly Mozilla/Kmail/Evolution/PINE mail tool has the MIME type set to open with OpenOffice then it can spread the worm around.
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.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
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.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
For the moment, I'm choosing to believe this is some freaky coincidence, but here's what happened.
I shut down extraneous programs, installed the new patches and several others from office.microsoft.com. After installing the patches it tells me I need to reboot, so I click on the happy little button. In the process of rebooting stuff starts to misbehave and hang. After killing several "not responding" processes, the computer does manage to shut itself down.
When it comes back on, I find that my keyboard is dead! Not only will the computer not accept keyboard input, but it appears like it has no power at all. The little Caps Lock, Num Lock, etc indicator lights are off and won't respond. Mouse and everything else appears to work fine. So now I shut down my computer entirely, unplug and replug the keyboard, and power it all back up. This time everything works with no problems.
Little freaky I must say. Never had anything quite like this happen before.
We didn't need no friggin PowerPoint presentations. I wouldn't want to view a presentation that doesn't have that distinctive purple ink smell.
I have done infosec in both a large funding-limited US government agency, and a well-funded network-savvy corporation. I'd like to suggest different reason lax security exists: funding.
In both cases, I saw that the IT support infrastructure (sysadmins, architects, desktop support, etc) were underfunded compared to the amount of new tasks and upkeep they were presented. These folks worked tirelessly just to keep their heads above the workflow. Security often added additional effort / steps / work to their already overwhelming load.
In the Gov't environment, this meant security practices were often ignored. Security was considered an additional effort, and the IT groups were not funded for it. Furthermore, there were few security experts (again - they were not funded for and rarely sought out). Often IT workers were oblivious to security practices to begin with.
In the well-funded corporate environment, implementing security practices involves a great deal of fighting and compromise. There was a well-funded infosec group who championed good security practices. However, the actual admin groups (who were otherwise excellent admins) were rarely knowledgable (or focused) on security issues. Their focus was simply to get things working. Thus, sometimes good security practices went in to place... sometimes security practices were compromised away... sometimes security practices were completely ignored.
It might be worth making another observation. I used to believe good security practices are just a part of being a good admin. I've changed my mind. It is a sign of an exceptional admin. A good unserstanding of infosec issues requires additional training and understanding that goes beyond the usual realm of administration. Infosec is a specialized skill. As such, those with knowledgeable admins should count themselves lucky. Most organizations will need to hire (or contract) infosec specialists who's focus is on secure (and workable - that's sometimes a tough tradeoff) implementations.
- Students, maybe, especially if they are marketing students...
- Engineers? Maybe, the same kind of engineers that build schools out of cardboard.
- IT Management? Yes, that's IT management, i.e. suits. I doubt that the developers, system engineers, designers etc would use that piece of shite.
- Researchers? Nope, those use latex or slitex.
- Training staff? Suits too.
I can't help that your job/experiences don't include presenting/being presented information to/from others.Just because you need to do a presentation does not mean that you have to do it using crappy software.
Good presentation software is invaluable to business and education.
Yes, good presentation software is invaluable.
> I did a presentation skills course. One of the rules was not to use slides at all unless you really need them. You simply don't need a slide that says we sold 100 000 units if you can just tell them.
I disagree. Some people absorb what they hear better than they absorb what they see, but for others it is just the opposite.
> Powerpoint - like a lot of modern software - reverses this rule by making the user subordinate to the software.
Yes. In particular, PP tempts presenters to add piles of useless and distracting bells and whistles to their presentations, with the result that the audience's comprehension goes down.
Comes to mind the story from last(?) year, where the Pentagon cracked down on presentations because all the audio files for machinegun fire in the background of PP presentations was eating up all their disk space. I have difficulty imagining any presentation that would be helped by the sound of machinegun fire.
However, the problem is not so much PowerPoint, but rather the stupidity of the average PP user.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Ever think that this article might be useful for those readers on /. who use windows that don't have the time to sift through microsoft press releases, or other news sites. Sure, lots of MS bashing results from articles like this, but some people will actually get informed and will download the necessary patches because of it.
As for the lack of linux articles, i think i disagree.
Got Freedom?
Thinking?
Most researchers don't use LaTeX for presentations. I would venture to guess that most Physics and Math professors don't even use LaTeX for presentations. I've seen some LaTeX presentations and I've even made one. It is my opinion that WYSIWYG is much more important for creating slides than it is for creating a document.
Keeping
Whoa there AC! I don't recall saying people should not use Powerpoint. I was just asking about anecdotes of people failing to use it well.
As a software developer, if large numbers of my customers can't figure out how to use my software, I have failed. I should review my interface or documentation and address it.
As a presenter, if my presentation tool is distracting people from the message, it is failing.
In the example of the `phantom forwarding presentation' the user was probably faced with a much more complicated tool than they really needed. That may point to the need for a default `simple' mode in the software.
(I myself never using anything more than text bullets, and embedded diagrams that I generate elsewhere in a presentation. I use a presentation for communicating, not entertaining. And to be specific. I use AppleWorks. It is relatively feature free, but it does everything I've ever needed in an office suite except for log scales on graphs and its free (as in beer).)
Somehow I suspect that line came from a Microsoft PR guy and not Symantec. After all, they know that any script kiddie will be able to easily exploit the hole once a single expert writes the script/program to generate or modify a XLS or PPT file that skirts the security checks. Even Microsoft should know this, but a PR guy's job is to gloss over how serious the problem really is.
My second favorite quote, immediately after it, reads:
TWO MONTHS!. I suppose Microsoft had their hands full with all these other worms/virii. Two months to respond to a major hole and write the patch is a great indication of how seriously (not!) Microsoft takes the security of their customers.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
From the story:
"The vulnerablity was first brought to Microsoft's notice about two months ago by Symantec."
Microsoft has known about this vulnerability and has taken two full months to warn users? Disturbing, if not surprising.
many /. readers are in tech support, maintaining M$ machines at work. these articles are useful: they serve a practical purpose.
however, maybe a new category for tech-support issues would be good.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
Wasn't Microsoft one of those companies that used to address some bugs in their software by saying that it would be fixed in the next release? In other words, if SuperPackage Version 2.0 that you spent a lot of money for doesn't work right or if you upgraded to 2.3 to fix it and that broke something else, you should rush out and spend more money as soon as SuperPackage 3.0 hits the shelves in order to correct the problem 'cause you done got all the tender lovin' care you're gonna out of us 'til we get some more of your money.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I can't speak for other fields but powerpoint is becoming very popular in the physics community, and I have seen some damn good presentations done on it. Most of them done by people who have forgotten more about *nix than you'll ever know.
I would love to hear about alternatives, but right now powerpoint is the best presentation software I've seen and I have a win2000 partition especially for it.
:wq
Many people may have held off upgrading because Office 97 does everything they need. MS states in their bulleting that Office 97 is an unsupported product. So to get "support" for any fixes to this bug, they must buy Office XP now. (and then download the patch.)
Ah, mimeograph fluid. Long before we were old enough to realize that "getting high" had nothing to do with aviation, the next best thing to Weekly Reader day was taking a deep breath as the handouts went 'round. :-)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
You are obviously an infidel who does not worship at the Holy Shrine of Charts and Graphs. Heathen.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Microsoft design choice not to include restrictive mode execution enviroments ( also known as "sandboxing" ) simliar to Javascript or Java's applets for Microsoft's embedded scripting puts users at risk when veiwing almost any disributed Microsoft document format.
. pn s.heretic@localhost.localdomain
I posted the following in various usenet groups last year. Given the recent events it is well worth the read...
Subject: Microsoft Applications Security
Date: 2000/05/28
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=slrn8j2cen
"This continued virus threat is not ONLY an email or Outlook problem it extends to all Microsoft Office products, Microsofts internet explorer as well as a lot of third party software for the Microsoft OS platforms."
Even with all the patches, anti-virus scanners and proxy firewall, it will not stop the average user clicking on an embedded https:// URL link in an email and downloading and opening a Microsoft format document with an embedded script containing a new "unknown" virus/malware.
Office users share documents over the net all the time, the inclusion of executable blocking, "run script" dialogs and digital script "signing" is a big improvement, but it all can be circumvented by a little social engineering.
Sun should be shipping this puppy AOL-style - Glue it in the back of every computer magazine out there. Load up the Windows version and the Linux version on the CD and pump them out into the hands of the public. For now, even the latest betas - they seem rock solid - plus, I'm sure people wouldn't mind updating in a few months, if they need.
Why exactly isn't this on the CDs of every distro, too? This should be there, as well as Mozilla.
Those two programs probably make Linux more desktop-worthy than any others, at least for people coming from a Windows environment.
If you're not really familiar with them, I wrote some pages on the subject - click my sig.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
Bored Sick Of Directors
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
screwing things up?
I'm not trying to say that you have a bad idea. I am genuinely interested in doing what you said, but I want to make sure that I can print a copy of the slides in case I can't use the computer during the presentation.
Keeping
One of the sources of insecurity is the fact that many of these programs run at the same security level. The security model in Windows NT is a pretty good one, but how useful is the system if you run as a normal user? How many of us run with Administrative priviledges on the system? How much work is it to set up a new application to work as its own user and then communicate with other applications running as services, authenticated as other users? It's not simple, because many applications seem to assume that they have the right to run as Administrator.
It's a good idea to run things as Least Priviledge, where a process only has enough rights on the system to do what it needs to, and nothing more. The downside to this is that you have to understand everything the application does. That takes a lot of time and effort, and how often in your average-sized business is there a computer geek on staff who has the time to devote to figuring out how to install the app with just enough priviledges so it will run, but not so many that it is a security risk? Seriously, how much time does something like this take?
I know it took me years of thinking about it to understand the guts of Windows 9x, and understand and appreciate how it worked so I could get it to do what I wanted it to. Not because I'm not smart enough to figure it out, but just because there was so much other stuff going on that was urgently needed that I didn't have the time to sit down and figure it out. Gradually, bit by bit, I did figure it out. Not just what the software does, but how it works, why it does what it does, what the implications are for configuring it in a certain way and then deciding how to implement it. A similar scenario was encountered with Windows NT and 2000. Just in time for the Windows XP system to come along, with a new set of rules.
There is a hideous amount of complexity involved with these operating systems, each with their own quirks and behaviors, and understanding everything well enough to be able to dig around in the guts and know what's going on and know how to lock it down is way more than one person can comfortably do if they are doing anything else on the job.
I don't believe there is any magic bullet solution to this, either. There are common practices and techniques that help with securing your network, but there is no lock-n-load solution. We have found tools that help us along the way, but they only help to implement the strategy - they are not the strategy themselves.
It's easy to blame Microsoft, because everyone is running their software. That's their own fault - they've monopolized the marketplace such that everyone uses the same platform. Consequently pretty much everyone is vulnerable to the exact same set of vulnerabilities. Any other common platform will likely have vulnerabilities that can be exploited. I'm not convinced that there isn't a code-red like vulnerability out there for Apache, but Microsoft has been targetted. (On the other hand, it's clear that there are significant problems inside IIS, and as a manager I wonder if they shouldn't dump the source code and start from scratch with better coding practices.) I can recall that Apache *did* have a number of exploits a number of years ago, but many of these have been dealt with in the intervening years.
In any case, I don't think it's either carelessness or incompetence, but marketing. Software under Windows tends to be devastatingly easy to install (compared to Linux, Unix, NetWare and other environments). Mac may be easier. But, just because the software installs easily, does not mean it installs securely. Currently, ease-of-use, ease-to-install and security are at odds with each other.
The argument has been made to get applications to install with least priviledge by default. It's a good design goal, but I wonder if application developers will ever have that as a fundamental design goal for their software. Usually it's a major accomplishment when the silly thing compiles!
I'll admit that I haven't used Windows in a while, but I can't imagine that Office 97 is really unsupported.
People put up with that crap?
OK... Here goes...
<LOUD> Listen here! Open Office is FREE. It probably does what you need. You don't need to break the law to use it at home. It does not currently have any of the virus problems that Office does. </LOUD>
Office 97 seemed like a pretty good product, once you installed it on a machine a couple generations later that a current PC at the time of release.
Personally, I'd be happy with Word 6. That was a good release, still-compatable file formats, nearly universal readability.
Open Office is a nice package that exceeds my modest needs. After having used it a bit, there is no way I'd even consider installing Office XP or whatever it is.
Sometimes, I just don't *get* people...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
What about printing? Can you print those onto transparencies without the 10"
screwing things up?
Sure, just make up a stylesheet that causes your presentation to be printable, call it "printable.css" and then switch that one occurence of the string "presentable.css" to "printable.css" in your presentation when you want to print it.
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
I don't think it was planned.   I think they rush to market on every release.   I believe it to be the company's modus operandi - get it out the door, fix the problems in a Service Pack.
Service Pack.   There's an awesome piece of marketing.   Microsoft calls 'patches' 'Service Packs' and averts contaminating the perception of The Product.   A patch is something you apply to something that's broken.   A 'Service Pack' is like getting something extra.   Genius.
It all seems so obvious.   Microsoft wanted to offer complete connectivity between products.   And they did.   And they rushed it to market without realizing how all this inter-process functionality could be exploited.   I'm sure it was the furthest thing from their minds - "Why would anyone want to use The Product to do anything bad?   We're just trying to provide solutions.  Why the hell are people using our 'Solutions' to cause problems?"
Spoing!
MjM
XKCD:Xeric Knowledge Comically Dispen
I have difficulty imagining any presentation that would be helped by the sound of machinegun fire.
I have been to many presentations that would have been improved were I there with an actual machine gun, making noises with it.
Last time i checked, most worms were also executed manually by dimwit users...
+++ath0
These macros were written for Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), which I think was introduced in the 1997 versions of the products. If you could dig up an earlier version, they used a macro language that was almost entirely incompatible with current scripts. (I know because this caused me enormous pain in trying to make a macro package compatible with both versions - it was all but impossible).
So if you have that ancient version lying around, you may want to use it. Or use programs with Word or Excel import filters instead of the real thing.
Anyone know if StarOffice is affected? When I checked it a few years back, it looked like it had a pretty complete emulation of VBA.
D
I don't think he was saying that you shouldn't do presentations, just that PowerPoint is lame software.
I have never used PowerPoint, but I can certainly say it is responsible for incredible numbers of terrifyingly bad presentations, so I think there are ample good reasons behind the prejudice.
I used Macromedia Flash for my last presentation - as cross-platform as it gets, and I was amazed at how flexible it was and how (comparatively) gentle the learning curve. It's well worth checking out in my view.
D
It took me months to find my first crashing bug in Mozilla (and that bugfix was obsolete by the time I got the patch to the developers).
The coolest thing about having the source is that when you disagree with the developers, you can Just Hack It. This doesn't buy you much if you then rely on your hacked copy (and have to maintain your hack), but it gives a much more level playing field if you want to discuss why making such a change would be a good thing, because you can show them how your proposal would behave.
In the case of MS Office, first thing I would have done years ago if I had the source is instrument the binary just to find out who is using macros and what for. I hate being told by users that they need dangerous feature X, only to learn later that they don't know how to use it if their lives depended on it.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
Just musing... I very rarely print anything. Maybe two or three pages per year.
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
Of course I can. There used to be a time when a virus checker only had to care about accesses to .EXE, .COM and .DLL. If you disable the "scan all file types" feature nowadays, you're vulnerable to macro attacks, and of course to the brilliant feature that allows files with the .CMD and a slew of other extensions to have an MZ magic header and be treated as a binary.
Those are design problems, that a virus checker has no speedy workaround for. It has to treat every file as hostile.
I don't want to know how many of our virus infections have a user who "optimized" his virus checker as the root cause.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.