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

Open Office...

[Sporkinum]

I open and create all of my presentations in either Open Office or Star Office. So I don't see and issues for me. I don't do anything esoteric, so I have never had a MS Office user have a problem with my presentations.

Powerpoint and Excel

[balsy2001]

When I was an intern at a company that was in a competition with other companies to get business from lockheed they sent out a CD with power point slides on it that showed how our company rated against other companies. They had "scrubbed" the presentation so that we didn't know who anyone was except for our own company. There were many Excel graphs in the slides. It turns out that not only were the graphs embedded in the slides but the entire spreadsheets to make them were too. This allowed me to find the code to un-scramble which companies were which. I am not sure if this was/still is an "exploit", but at least something that every one should be aware of.

So .... what would do it?

[StressGuy]

Flip Chart?, Chalk board?, Shadow Puppets?

Not to be mean, but Powerpoint is merely a tool purpose-designed for doing presentations. It is quite possible to write a good presentation in Poser-poi...er...Powerpoint, it just can't compensate for a bad presenter.

I like OpenOffice Impress as well BTW.

Re:So .... what would do it?

[jarich]

people are free to review material at their own pace without interrupting the presentation.

Translation: People are free to ignore the presenter while the audience flips through the paper and reads at their own pace.

Then, after the presenter has wasted their time talking, you can tune back in and ask the questions that were just answered in the presentation.

Then the presenter can answer the same questions for the next person who also tuned out to read the hand outs.. then again for the next person....

Later the presenter can hear you gripe about much time was wasted with all the questions.

If the information can be conveyed with a handout, send email. If it can't, have a meeting, ~then~ provide hand outs. Don't duplicate. Violates the DRY principal. ;)

Re:Does all Microsoft content have to be executabl

[Anonymous Coward]

Postscript is the classic bad example. The Postscript model is explicitly an interpreter. As a result, it's difficult to do anything with a Postscript document other than print it in the specified format.

I might be wrong, but wasn't the whole point of PostScript to be for printing? I think in that respect it succeeded rather well. I wasn't meant to be converted to different formats or re-aspected (actually pure "size" conversion [scaling] works well because its not raster) or edited or anything else.

And PostScript is still pretty heavily used in decent printers. PDF certainly has some PS heritage.

Evil

[the eric conspiracy]

What do you expect, Power Point is EVIL