Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Word Security Flaw
JWL-23 writes: "cnn.com is reporting that a Microsoft Word flaw may allow file theft. Furthermore, they plan on not fixing Word 97, leaving millions of users out in the cold. Yet another reason to try OpenOffice.org." It still takes more than running Word to expose the contents of your hard drive though.
Thank god I downloaded openoffice last night.
My sister's entire school district is switching to it, it's cheap and open source, so theres no "were not going to fix it" crap.
Schools have been sold on the idea that students need to learn the microsoft products for the business world. But I say if you learn open office you'll be able to use office 2000 should an employer some day down the road still be using it.
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
I loved this one:
"It's incredible to me that Microsoft would turn its back on Word 97 users," said Woody Leonhard, who has written books on Microsoft's Word and Office software. "They bought the package with full faith in Microsoft and its ability to protect them from this kind of exploit."
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, "Bill says, 'I refuse to fix bugs, for patches deny faith, and without faith I am nothing.' "
I know of quite a few businesses that dont feel the need to pay for an upgrade when Word 97 does everything they need. There's no incentive to upgrade. (Even now, because they don't use the document protection features)
Seriously, I would like to hear one compelling reason to upgrade from Word 97 to a newer version if all you use word for is word processing and basic mail merge.
that qualcomm (maker of the eudora PIM/email client) was the company that found the bug? not that I like microsoft, but somehow this was a sneaky way to undermine microsoft by releasing to the public such a huge bug.
I just wonder... did qualcomm try to blackmail microsoft first, before releasing the "scoop" on the bug?
>Well, that sounds like an excellent motivator to
>try harder to get it right the first time!
Name one major software product that has been bug-free from initial release.
For that matter, name one major software product that has ever been bug-free at any point in its lifetime.
-l
Yet another reason why MS Word is not a document exchange format. That rant is also avaible in other formats
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
Analyst Laura DiDio of the Yankee Group said companies are taking a risk by using such old software, but Microsoft should correct the problem because of its severity.
I am having a hard time getting my head around the concept that newer software equals software with "less risk". I do not understand why a product, open or closed, is inherently more "risky" due to its age. Perhaps she means un-patched old software? Is she advising users of a genuine risk, or is she making the case for a revenue stream and saying that IS Managers who do not stay "less old" in their application selections are jeopardizing their companies? Although she admonishes Microsoft to fix the problem, it seems her implication is that said managers are negligent, as opposed to the software vendor who may or may not patch the hole they wrote.
"Furthermore, they plan on not fixing Word 97, leaving millions of users out in the cold."
That's not entirely true. It is true that before this story broke, Microsoft had no plans on updating or offering any new fixes for anything '97.
However, CNN and AP reported this morning that Micorsoft hasn't ruled out a fix and that they are in the process of determining what it would take to make a fix available.
Is there any way we can make a filesharing protocol based on this, and have gateway machines that mirror files that are behind facist firewalls that block gnutella ports to gnutella ? A kind of really long latency email server ?
>>product that has been bug-free from initial release
Citronella candles?
I receive documents for review and editing from up to 400 different people -- and I'm not even all that high up the food chain. This would easily work on me -- and I'm very security concious. This isn't like "don't click on attachments from people you don't know" -- it falls more into the category of "don't ever use word and outlook and office for what they're designed to do." (I know -- use OO... When somebody convinces the government to do that...)
I do not read or respond to AC's. If you want a discussion, log in. Otherwise, don't waste your time.
The free upgrades that you seek can be downloaded here. Just don't go telling everyone because people will take advantage of their generosity.
1) IMHO the emphasis on Word97 is wrong. I originally tested this on Word2000 and it worked perfectly.
2) I was not out to find yet another M$ bug. I was using Word for my daily work when I stumbled onto this. It was one of those "I wonder what this button does" things.
3) The vulnerability is actually a lot more serious than the AP and bugtraq posts reveal. There is actually a way to skip the last step where the victim returns the bugged file. In other words, just editing and saving (or printing) the bugged file is sufficient. Look for a new bugtraq post early next week.
I'm not making any accusations *cough*, but does this strike anyone else as a great addition to Microsoft's "fuck them over and make them upgrade" business model? Leave a product full of security flaws, and, years later, when people aren't upgrading to the new version, refuse to fix security flaws in the old versions.
t tp://news.com.com/2100-1001-253578.html?legacy=c net
Refer to:
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-273276.html
h
"play up what a nightmare Microsoft malware is, and how easy and free OS software is"
No, I'd say use your head and give some insightful advice, rather than spout off like a ranting zealot. Don't "play up" anything. Give the truth.
Don't lie about how easy it is to install and configure the OSS equivalents. Don't pretend they're going to be 100% compatible. And in gods name, stop with the "microsoft owns your soul" rants. Once that user realises you lied, there goes your credibility, your 'stroke'. Next time they'll ask for advice from the kid at the counter of the local Office Depot.
If OSS is going to 'empower' people, it won't be through a bunch of FUD and politics. Let it sink or swim on its own virtues.
This isn't a message directed at you, but rather to all who want to actually help open source be taken seriously.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Turning on Tools | Options | General | Macro virus protection ought to help. Yes, I looked at the Word97 menu to validate that... .doc's, lacked I all self respect. /. motto 'News for nerds, stuff that matters'. It's not news, for nerds, nor does it matter.
It strikes me that I know enough VBA that I could probably write some horrific trojan
While no great supporter of his Majesty Satanic, this article seems rather a stretch of the
Come to think of it, such a stunt is likely also possible in Word Basic under Lose3.1, for the 286 diehards out there. Shall we also excoriate Redmond for failing to skin dive in that septic tank of code? Some old bastard in Scotsdale, AZ might be writing his memoir using that application, you know...
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Incidentally, Microsoft isn't "leaving millions of users of Word 97 without a fix." The fix is to upgrade your five-year-old copy of Word, get all the "great" features Microsoft has included since 97, and put money into Microsoft's coffers so they can develop great new features for Word 2007. Of course, that's Microsoft's solution. The better solution is to wipe your hard disk and download the Red Hat ISO or buy a Mac before you become further entangled in Microsoft's web.
If they were that gullible, this is the least worrisome of their problems. FUD in an AP article? I am shocked! I hope that's not the fix. "Ford suggests drivers check their oil and tire pressure before each time they start their cars."Just another argument for using open-source software whenever you possibly can. If you discover a bug like this and the author isn't willing to fix it, you can always fix it yourself. Why would you ever want to leave this decision to someone else?
Yeah, 'cuz whenever I suspect a shortcoming in the Linux kernel, I break out emacs and beat it back into shape. Right. After I correct any perceived shortcomings in emacs, that is.
I could always hire or convince someone else to fix a problem for me (with open source software), but that might rapidly amount to an obscene monetary of temporal cost (for an individual to bear) after adding up each fix requested, and doing so still leaves the decision to someone else.
So, I basically have to be able to (a) understand and (b) correct the code "behind" the software packages I use in order to derive full benefit from open source software? That line of thinking doesn't seem very compelling to me.
Nine times out of ten (at least), the only difference is that I, as an end-user, am waiting for a different group of people to improve the products I use. Maybe they'll fix it, maybe they won't -- because, as you point out:
Food for thought?
I'm on the same boat. I definately couldn't fix security holes in the software I run (especially considering that I'd have to have a fscking HUGE /usr/src partition). Even if I could, I don't know if I would trust the patch since:
1: I didn't write the software in the first place.
2: I'm not a full time programmer, I'm an administrator.
Can all fish swim?
Insane. You know, if Isuzu discovered a fatal flaw in all Rodeos going back through 1997 yet announced they were only going to provide fixes for models '00, '01 and '02 there would be a congressional investigation.
Completely insane.
http://kered.org
FTA:
But, referring to Microsoft engineers, McGee said "there's only so far back they can go."
No. There's only so far back they WILL go. There is a HUGE difference. Microsoft has CHOSEN not to support it, it's not that they can't.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
The logic of this eludes me.
If you are using Word97 and somebody else is using WordXP. The other person will get the patch.
Opensource software now...
You are using KDE1 and somebody else is using KDE3. Security Hole X that is in both. KDE3 will get 'patched' or at least fixed, I doubt that KDE1 will get fixed. The only benefit here is that you could potentially fix it yourself, but if you are using KDE1 i doubt you really would.
What we see depends on mainly what we look for. -- John Lubbock Now search for that bug slave!
View some of the past word docs you've received in a hex editor...
Near the bottom there is often information from other documents of the sender that they were recently working on. I don't know why it saves this. Maybe something to do with the undo buffer?
At work I used to look at internal memos that would be sent out on a weekly basis and find out all sorts of other stuff that was going on.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
"Furthermore, they plan on not fixing Word 97, leaving millions of users out in the cold. Yet another reason to try OpenOffice.org."
They say that like other companies don't orphan software after 5 years. Programs become obsolete. Are we to ask Adobe to support Photoshop 4 still after it's had (at least) two major releases after it?
...richie - It is a good day to code.
I write very basic Visual Basic scripts to automate the transcrition process for a large hospital. Miscosoft Word is completely insecure. Every Word document can contain one or more large complete applications that can interact with the internet, the network, a user's computer etc. Even with my very limited and basic knowledge I could (and have) accomplished the above. Every transcribed document in my department of this hospital is full of my code. If I was a certain type of person, the danger to patient privacy and confidentiality would be immense. I'm not like that but the idea that companies, hospital and governments world-wide use use Word on a daily basis is rather unsettling. I can only image the explots that someone who A) really knew what they were doing and B) lacked ethical standards could accomplish.
In the same week we wondered why Miscrosoft was making HP/Compaq kneel and beg to "be able" to provide MS Windows with each PC. (rather than Microsoft thinking themselves "lucky" to be moving so many copies of their software)....Along comes this as to where Microsoft may refuse to patch Word 97. Now I personally know of quite a few fortune 500 companies that are still 100% Word 97.....Would not this size and (clout) of a user base still warrant security patches to serious holes? (Well for most software companies it would -- but Microsoft's relationship..err..monopoly with their customer base in almost 180 degrees from everyone else.)
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I'm only coming from personal experience, in particular an experience we had at work with SaMBa.
We had this paper tiger straight from the "newbie factory" of the local college. We had a task for a particular client, which boiled down to a fileserver with a big shared folder for images (photos).
So, this kid starts immediately frothing at the mouth about linux and SaMBa. He lied (probably out of ignorance) about how it's completely seamless on a Win2k network. He ranted about how much we'll save by not having to pay to liscense another copy of Win2k for the client.
Well, he got the marketing types convinced. Next thing I know, we're (we as in ME, I do the work around here) knee deep in all the kludges, hacks and nonsense involved in getting the SaMBa box to work exactly as we wanted it to, logging onto the Win2k domain, retrieving user lists, faking NTFS security, etc.
The management, the client, everyone involved became increasingly frustrated.
Long story short, we pissed away countless man-hours before finally acquiescing and just installing another Win2k pro box, which took all of 5 minutes to configure.
The kid has since left, and now about 6 months later, I have other projects that scream for the likes of linux, SaMBa, MySQL. Noone in this office wants to hear it, and think I've become some sort of zealot.
To me, it's just a matter of the right tool for the right job. SaMBa wasn't the right tool for that task, but it is for others. But the frenzied ideology has basically driven it out of this office, at least for the time being.
It's just an anecdotal example of how one well-meaning zealot can do much more damage than good. It happens to be one of my pet peeves.
So, in the meantime, I continue to advocate OSS solutions where they're practical. And its slowly but surely working. I was actually allowed to use a spare pentium box and CoyoteLinux to replace a buggy router in our testing 'bullpen'.
I guess I don't see OSS as 'a cause'. I try to think through problems logically and practically. Sometimes OSS is a logical, practical solution. Sometimes not. I just hate my options being slowly limited as people in the 'industry' line up on one side of the imaginary fence of the other.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Open source developers are more responsible than closed source developers? Could you please tell me why?
It's so difficult to define what constitutes a "major" problem, and what the seller should be obligated to fix.
Does it work as a word processor? Will it allow you to read, write, print, and format documents? Well if it didn't do those, then I would say it is a major problem. If it emailed personal information to random people on start up, then I would call it a problem, or if it caused your firewall software to crash everytime you opened a .doc file, I would call it a major problem.
If you discover a bug like this and the author isn't willing to fix it, you can always fix it yourself. Why would you ever want to leave this decision to someone else?
Perhaps because I am not a software engineer, and I know that my mother barely knows how to poerate the mouse, let alone debug complex software.
The problem here, is that someone found a way to exploit a Microsoft Word Feature. Now we can tell them to do things in the name of security, oh wait, isn't that what we all complain Bush is doing?
A very famous man once said something along the lines of "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security".
You are giving up features for temporary security. Anything Microsoft does will be a temporary fix. There are enough hackers out there that hate microsoft that no matter what, they will find a new way to exploit the software. Now before I hear any, "that's because microsoft sucks, use linux" comments, if all the people out there trying to find cracks and exploits for MS Software were instead going agains Linux, or other open sourced applications, you'd find just as many problems.
Don't believe me. Put up an appache web page on a linux box, or what ever opensourced so. Now have the only line on the page say "You can't hack this box". Get a link somewhere that people are going to see it, and then talk to me in a month as to how safe your page was.
Xaotik Designs
I am assuming that your IT group hasn't done any stability testing
:-)
You are of course assuming that our IT group is stable enough to perform that kind of testing...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
This horrible bug could even allow invaders to install malicious or undesirable software such as MS-Word 97.
Oh, wait
Table-ized A.I.
What, you mean linus still produces patches for 1.1.x? Or that samba still fixes holes in 1.8.x? Or that apache still fixes holes in 1.2.x?
<grub> Reading
Rather than penalizing them, this "fixes in current versions only" policy makes it PROFITABLE for the software vendor to write flaws into the code. They are acutally better off selling products that have serious proiblems.
"Now that we got you hooked and your company has stadardized on our product and all of your documents are in our proprietary format...if you want a version that really works (or doesn't possibly expose your data to damage), pay us $200 (a year) for the upgrade!"
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
Of course, there's a way to address this problem with...a Word Macro! :)
Sub AutoOpen()
'
' IncludeTextBarrer Macro
' Macro created 9/13/2002 by Geoff Speare
' Created for Word 2000, use at own risk, etc.
'
Dim count As Integer
Dim vbFix As VbMsgBoxResult
Dim blFoundOne As Boolean
blFoundOne = False
For count = 1 To ActiveDocument.Fields.count
If ActiveDocument.Fields(count).Type = wdFieldIncludeText Then
blFoundOne = True
vbFix = MsgBox("An INCLUDETEXT field has been found. Would you like to lock it? " & _
"(Select All and then Ctrl-4 will unlock all fields if you change your mind.)", vbYesNo, "INCLUDETEXT Exploit Detection")
If vbFix = vbYes Then
ActiveDocument.Fields(count).Locked = True
End If
End If
Next
If blFoundOne Then
MsgBox "Your document may have a field which secretly includes text from another file. You may wish " & _
"to Reveal Field Codes (ALT-F9) and examine the document closely before saving or distributing it.", vbOKOnly, _
"INCLUDETEXT Exploit Detection"
End If
End Sub
But back to my original point - there are many contexts where it is literally day-to-day routine for lawyers to email Word documents back and forth, with each recipient detaching and saving the file, throwing in a few edits, and sending it back. In some situations, such as court documents that typically are negotiated, then filed jointly (e.g., proposed pretrial and scheduling orders), this interaction occurs among parties who are adversaries in a lawsuit - the farthest thing I can imagine from a trusted exchange.
This alone allows substantial opportunity for exploitation. Even if you don't know any specific filenames, it seems as though you could easily grab the Registry, which is always named the same thing, and learn at least some path and filename information from it. And also keep in mind that many firms (not ours, fortunately) use a stupid auto-format that appends the path and filename into the footer of a document. Let's say I was an unscrupulous lawyer co-drafting a scheduling order, and knew about this exploit. I might go through the earlier files and records in the case, and look at the briefs my opponent filed. If the filename was in the footer, I could rig the scheduling order to get the brief, which would contain not only the printed text I'd already seen when the brief was filed, but perhaps leftover redlines, comments, those mysterious fragments at the bottom, etc.
To answer your obvious questions: (1) no, I haven't tried it, and I'm not planning to, so I don't know if it would actually work, and (2) I have sent the Bugtraq link to the one non-worthless person in our IT department, and (3) yes, I realize this is not a macro exploit technically, so turning macros off won't help. But folks, this is really scary, and I am sure that legal practice is not the only line of business where "enemies" or untrusted parties exchange Word documents via email. That is how the world does business these days.
No, no, no. This is not a sig.