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Was This the Phishing E-mail That Took Down RSA?
alphadogg tips this IDG News report: "'I forward this file to you for review. Please open and view it.' As a ploy to get a hapless EMC recruiter to open up a booby-trapped Excel spreadsheet, it may not be the most sophisticated piece of work. But researchers at F-Secure believe that it was enough to break into one of the most respected computer security companies on the planet, and a first step in a complex attack that ultimately threatened the security of major U.S. defense contractors including Lockheed Martin, L-3, and Northrop Grumman. The e-mail was sent on March 3 and uploaded to VirusTotal a free service used to scan suspicious messages, on March 19, two days after RSA went public with the news that it had been hacked in one of the worst security breaches ever."
Indeed, there should be a strict separation between documents (things you merely view and possibly edit) and programs (things which do something). Unfortunately that line has been crossed by about every document format, from office files (Word, Excel, ...) over HTML (JavaScript) to PDF.
There should be a set of standard document formats which are guaranteed to not contain any executable code whatsoever, so except for possibly exploiting buffer overflows in interpreting code, displaying the documents is safe. It should be impossible by specification to insert any "active content", i.e. programs, in such documents.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I worked for RSA for 4 years, both before and after EMC acquired them (I was not working there when the break-in occurred). The security experts at RSA are not the people that are running EMC corporate IT. When the acquisition occurred, RSA IT was one of the first groups to be let go. EMC IT policy seemed to be more worried about meeting regulations for compliance than for implementing security policies that actually made sense.