Bugtraq mailing list archives
Re: Microsoft Word documents that "phone" home
From: Peter Ilieve <peter () ALDIE CO UK>
Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2000 11:36:49 +0100
Charles Sprickman asked:
Is anyone aware of whether or not other applications capable of opening word docs are vulnerable. Examples would be StarOffice and Applixware...
I tried it with StarOffice 5.1 (on a Sun running Solaris 8). I copied bugged.doc to the Sun's local disk and opened it. StarOffice put up a dialogue box saying: Error opening document file:///path/to/bugged.doc: The action could not be completed because you are offline. Do you want to activate the Online mode?? If I hit the No button it opened the document but didn't fetch the image. It had a broken image icon and `Read Error' in red at the top of a bounding box for the image. I opened it again and hit the Yes button. This time it did load the image, showing a count of 21,583 and the Sun's hostname. If I opened bugged.doc again in offline mode it still displayed the image, but it didn't fetch it again. It must cache it somewhere. I don't use StarOffice much so hadn't been aware of its offline and online modes. It has a button at the right hand end of the toolbar to control this. It defaults to offline. I'm a bit baffled by Microsoft's response to this. They seem to have latched onto the word cookies. The main issue is that a document, a piece of data to most people, phones home and leaves an entry in a server log when someone looks at this supposed inert data. Peter Ilieve peter () aldie co uk
Current thread:
- Re: Microsoft Word documents that "phone" home Charles Sprickman (Sep 01)
- Message not available
- Re: Microsoft Word documents that "phone" home Peter Ilieve (Sep 02)
- Message not available
- <Possible follow-ups>
- Re: Microsoft Word documents that "phone" home Don Halterman (Sep 01)
- Re: Microsoft Word documents that "phone" home Hal DeVore (Sep 02)
- Re: Microsoft Word documents that "phone" home Rob Slade, doting grandpa of Ryan and Trevor (Sep 01)
- Re: Microsoft Word documents that "phone" home Rex Sanders (Sep 01)
- Re: Microsoft Word documents that "phone" home Kris Kennaway (Sep 01)
- Re: Microsoft Word documents that "phone" home Michael Wojcik (Sep 01)
- Re: Microsoft Word documents that "phone" home Microsoft Security Response Center (Sep 01)
- Re: Microsoft Word documents that "phone" home Terje Bless (Sep 02)
- Re: Microsoft Word documents that "phone" home Brad (Sep 02)
- Other file formats that can "phone" home Richard M. Smith (Sep 03)