Word 98 Insecurity

From: Mike (mikeat_private)
Date: Fri Jun 19 1998 - 11:48:48 PDT

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    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
    
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