Microsoft Warns of PowerPoint Attack

narramissic writes to let us know about yet another PowerPoint flaw, this one affecting PowerPoint 2000, 2002, and 2003, soon after Microsoft issued a record number of patches to fix numerous Office vulnerabilities (among others). The new problem came to light in a blog posting by Microsoft Security Program Manager Alexandra Huft, but the coverage at ITWorld has more detail. Huft writes, "We've been made aware of proof of concept code published publicly affecting Microsoft Office 2003 PowerPoint," and goes on to say that Microsoft is not aware of any attacks that exploit the bug.

Comments

Re:Good.

[TobyRush]

I don't use PowerPoint. When I go to a meeting, which is often, I immediately leave the room if someone decides to bore me with stupid phrases in 12-centimetre type.

To be fair, that's not PowerPoint's fault; it's a lack of presentation skill that seems to pervade the business culture today. If I am talking finances and I have a $2000 laptop and a $4500 projector displaying this on the screen:

Finances
- income
- spending

...then it doesn't matter what software I'm using, I'm wasting resources. PowerPoint has a lot of functionality that can be used to enhance presentations but most people don't use it. So they could really just use a word processor or slideshow program to do practically the same thing.

If you want bash PowerPoint (and I realize that wasn't necessarily the parent's goal), try this: the interface STINKS. I haven't used OpenOffice or StarOffice, but if they are trying to emulate PowerPoint's interface, then I won't bother.

<fanboi>I'm a Mac user and Keynote is much, MUCH more elegant to use... and can even import and export PowerPoint files.</fanboi>