Date: Fri, 19 Jun 1998 13:48:48 -0500 From: Mike <mike@WOWDX.NET> Subject: Word 98 Insecurity When fooling around with Word 98 on the Macintosh, I found the following SEVERE insecurity. 1. Open a few documents, work on your Macintosh for a while. 2. Open word 98 and compose a message, then save it to your dirve. 3. Attach the document to an email, and send it. 4. open the resulting document from the email when you receive it in BBEdit. The file can be read plain text with all sorts of juicy information like passwords, URLS, document locations, etc, all from the origionating computer. We have been able to successfully gleam passwords and logins from the file, IN PLAIN TEXT. It contains information that is MONTHS old from the orginating computer. This was tested only on the Macintosh version of Word 98, and the emails were sent via Eudora. NOTE: This is not specifically an email problem. If you open the saved document on your harddrive - you get the same results! Could someone please confim this problem occurs on a PC as well. Microsoft has not yet been notified (hopfully they are on the list :) It seems (not that I know too much about this sort of thing) that when the word document is saved, for some reason it is grabbing buffer informtion from the computer to fill up space in the file. I guess you can figure out what kind of insecurity this could be!!!! Cheers Mike -------------------------------------------------- | Mike Morton DXStorm Geek Team Leader | | | | mike@dxstorm.com | DXShop ...Open For Business! | -------------------------------------------------- | Quality Developers of Above Quality Solutions | | http://www.dxshop.com | -------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 22 Jun 1998 07:52:11 -0500 From: Mike <mike@WOWDX.NET> Subject: Microsoft Insecurity... Well! After an overwhelming response from everyone, just a summery of the conclusions: 1. This is a Microsoft Application problem, from Word, excel, etc from way back as far as Word 2.0 2. This has been reported before to Microsoft, without any kind of response or patch, etc 3. The problem is that the Microsoft Applications take RAM or Buffer blocks to fill out application files - reading plaintext, etc, indiscriminately. 4. Suggestions to turn off the 'Fast Save' option help, but do not by any means eliminate the problem. 5. There is no other Fix - other than not attaching an application document to send to anyone who could possibly use it maliciously. 6. I think I have heard the opinions from everyone EXCEPT any sort of Microsoft rep, surprised? 7. It would be a simple fix of encrypting the 'fill' information with a simple MD5 encryption or something similar, just to eliminate any plaintext. Thanks to everyone for their suggestions and information.... Cheers Mike -------------------------------------------------- | Mike Morton DXStorm Geek Team Leader | | | | mike@dxstorm.com | DXShop ...Open For Business! | -------------------------------------------------- | Quality Developers of Above Quality Solutions | | http://www.dxshop.com | -------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 22 Jun 1998 10:00:45 -0700 From: Courteney van den Berg <cjv@RBMI.ORG> Subject: Re: Microsoft Insecurity... This is an OLE structured storage problem, not a Microsoft application problem (although very few non-Microsoft apps use OLE structured storage). It was fixed on Windows95 a long time ago by an OLE patch (see MS KB article Q139432). Microsoft need a kick in the pants for leaving such an old bug in their latest release of MAC OLE though. I guess the MAC OLE source is probably based on an ancient version of the PC OLE code. CJ van den Berg Computer Information Systems Department CfaN cjv@cfan.org