Black Hat Talk Demonstrates New Document Exploits 60
darthcamaro writes "Remember the days of the viruses embedded in email attachments? They're coming back, according to a pair of researcher talking at Black Hat this week: '"If you have installed all Microsoft Office patches and there are no 0 day vulnerabilities, will it be safe to open a Word or Excel document?" TT asked the audience. "The answer is no."'"
Is this really news? (Score:3, Insightful)
Anybody worth their salt knows that any attachment can be dangerous. You can hide all sorts of things in them. Especially for files that allow arbitrary things to be embedded in them, like Word documents.
In other news... (Score:2, Insightful)
In other news, embedding executable code into data files still considered stupid. Researchers continue to emphasize that executable code should only exist in (wait for it) -- executable files!
Now, we all understand that Intel and Microsoft had drunken money sex one evening and out of that relationship DOS was born... a retarded child that couldn't tell the difference between its food (the data) and the plate (executable code), and regularly ate both.
I'm just wondering why we're still entertaining this 'precious snowflake' and it's plate-eating habits twenty years on. Didn't we learn from the retarded kid that isolating data from executable code from the hardware level up was the Right Thing?
Flash? (Score:2, Insightful)
The reason why the answer is no is because of hybrid document attack techniques. TT explained that in the hybrid document exploit a Flash file is embedded in Excel or Word document.
Ok Microsoft... why the hell are you allowing Flash inside Word and Excel documents in the first place?!?
"and there are no 0 day vulnerabilities" (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes... THAT YOU KNOW ABOUT - of course, if you know about them, they're not zero-day vulnerabilities.
What a load of crap. YES there are, probably, vulnerabilities that you don't know about (I.E. zero-day vulnerabilities). NO you can't EVER say "there are no 0 day vulnerabilities", because if there are, you won't know about them until you find them! Who the fuck wrote that, anyway? A 0-day vulnerability is a vulnerability that you DON'T KNOW EXISTS.
Anyone who THINKS that there are no zero-day vulnerabilities is, statistically speaking, WRONG. There are. And therefore, yes:
If you have installed all Microsoft Office patches ... will it be safe to open a Word or Excel document? ... The answer is no.
Because a Word or Excel document could always exploit a vulnerability that you DON'T KNOW ABOUT.
That's sort of the whole fucking point, right?