[16524] in bugtraq
Re: Microsoft Word documents that "phone" home
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Peter Ilieve)
Sat Sep 2 16:10:25 2000
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Message-ID: <1000902113649.ZM403356@basteir.aldie.co.uk>
Date: Sat, 2 Sep 2000 11:36:49 +0100
Reply-To: Peter Ilieve <peter@ALDIE.CO.UK>
From: Peter Ilieve <peter@ALDIE.CO.UK>
To: BUGTRAQ@SECURITYFOCUS.COM
In-Reply-To: Charles Sprickman <spork@inch.com> "Re: Microsoft Word documents
that "phone" home" (Aug 31, 6:05pm)
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
