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Third Microsoft Word Code Execution Exploit Posted
gregleimbeck writes "Exploit code for a third, unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft Word has been posted on the Internet, adding to the software maker's struggles to keep up with gaping holes in its popular word processing program.
The attack code, available at Milw0rm.com, contains sample Word documents that have been rigged to launch code execution exploits when the file is opened."
I always suspected that Microsoft Word was Turing-complete.
I tried to open the PoC with OpenOffice 2.0.4 and it crashed. Can someone confirm?
/usr/lib/openoffice/program/soffice: line 236: 12793 Segmentation fault "$sd_prog/$sd_binary" "$@"
ooffice2 12122006-djtest.doc
This may not be a code execution bug; I'll try to trace it with gdb to see what happens.
Ads? What ads?
I did. My brain went blue screen and shut down. My attorney will be in touch.
What exactly does Microsoft suggest that I do with Word files? Besides using them to fragment my hard-disk? Maybe I can burn them to keep warm in the winter... um, no.
Or perhaps I'll just use Word to create and save HTML files!!
I tried switching my dad to Open Office when we couldn't find the MS Office CD - he immediately complained that the small fonts he was using in his spreadsheets (less than 8 points) didn't render nicely in OO compared to Excel, so he went and bought a copy of Office 2003.
Little things like that count for a lot. OO might be more secure than MS Office, but it's terrible quality software in user-visible ways (i.e. it's ugly, slow and bloated). These things count to people. Little problems can't just be overlooked because it's free. My dad could pick it apart within minutes, and he doesn't normally care about software at all. He didn't care about paying for Office either, in fact he didn't think twice about it.
That's why. Nothing to do with TCO, Microsoft being evil, security, monopoly or anything else. OpenOffice just isn't very good in the ways that count to regular users.
"I see that you are trying to craft an exploit. Would you like me to assist?"
We use both Microsoft Office and OpenOffice in our company. OO is for all internal documents, and Microsoft Office is used for external client work - purely for interoperability with corporate / government clients. Open Office can save into Microsoft Office format, but there are invariably subtle differences in the final layout - and that is just plain unacceptable.
In the past 12 months a few clients have started using OO and we now share OO documents with them - but they are by far the minority. Hopefully the new "Open" format Microsoft is coming out with will break the barrier down, and allow pixel-perfect interoperability, but until then it is very difficult to operate in a corperate world without the "de-facto" Microsoft Office standard.
If you knew enough to download it for him you should have known enough to turn on antialiasing for font sizes 8 and lower in the options menu.
And if you knew end-users enough to comment on them, you should have known enough that end-users won't know how to turn this on.
See, software shouldn't "get in the way" of what you're trying to do.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
This goes under the category of basic internet security. Don't open files from people you don't know. And if you do get a wierd file from someone you don't know stop and think for 10 seconds about it before you open it. Or, buy a mac.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milw0rm
milw0rm is a group of "hacktivists" best known for penetrating the computers of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in Bombay, the primary nuclear research facility of India, on June 3, 1998. The attack generated heated debate on the security of information in a world prevalent with countries developing nuclear weapons, the ethics of "hacker activists" or "hacktivists," and the importance of advanced security measures in a modern world filled with teenagers willing and able to break into insecure international websites.
From TFA:
So yet again it's a case of embedded code within a data file wreaking havoc. And as already been reported in comments here, this vulnerability also exists in OO.org.
Seeing this kind of thing always blows my mind. I would be greatly interested in hearing the rationale behind the decision to incorporate this feature. What the hell did they need that for?
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
But seriously, why would anyone use anything M$ when there are non-stop bugs and security holes. Open Office / Google Writely anyone?
(Insert random application name here) with vulnerability running as root is the problem. MS Word hole only amplifies it because it's widely used. But the problem is that everyone and their dog is running Windows as administrator.
If you want more of your clients to change to OO, just run "strings" on their .doc files and email them the parts that came from other documents. That should be enough to get them to change their minds about it.
(For the uninitiated, As you edit a document in MS Word, it picks up bits of other documents you have open at the time or even previously opened. This is because it doesn't clear memory before using it, and the fast-save file format is really more a memory dump. This may have been fixed in the latest version of MS Word; I certainly hope so...)
And UNIX people know this, as it took decades to fix their OS.
... file's position-sensitive tests are normally implemented by matching various locations within the file against a textual database of magic numbers (see the Usage section). This differs from other simpler methods such as file extensions and schemes like MIME.
Speaking specifically about using file extensions, I think 'decades' is a little strong.
From Wikipedia's FILE entry:
The original version of file originated in Unix Research Version 4 in 1973
Even if you happen to believe that the real improvements to file were not made until System V, that was 1983...so not decadeS, but decade.
So no, not a troll and not revisionist. You make it sound like Unix was not usable until the 1990's.
Computational Chemistry products and services.
Uh if that happens then the language used is obviously unsafe.
The language isn't "unsafe" - it just lets you do some very, very nifty stuff that noobtard programmers are better off leaving alone.
C++ has perfectly "safe" features - the Standard Template Library has container classes like strings and vectors that won't overflow no matter how careless you are.
For those who insist on going down to the byte level and concatenating their strings themselves, Microsoft included "safe" versions of these functions in Visual Studio 2005, and will compile with warnings if you use the dangerous, buffer-overrun-producing variants.
Why should potentially arbitrary code be executed because a program tries to put data somewhere it won't fit?
Because a hacker's input and a programmer's overconfidence in his manual input validation (or lack thereof) put the hacker's code over the program itself. It fit just fine where the still-running program used to be.
This can happen in any language - C++ programmers are simply notoriously bad at input validation.
DATABASE WOW WOW
"Data used by Microsoft Word to construct a destination address for a memory copy routine is embedded within a Word document itself."
If this is a standard practice at Microsoft, I'm beginning to understand why they are so relunctant to publish their protocols and standards.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc