more on No Word for you today

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Steven M. Bellovin" <[email protected]>
Date: December 6, 2006 9:36:44 PM EST
To: [email protected]
Cc: Ed Gerck <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [IP] No Word for you today

On Wed, 6 Dec 2006 21:22:26 -0500
David Farber <[email protected]> wrote:


> "Microsoft suggests that users 'not open or save Word files,' even
> from trusted sources."
>
> http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/06/0230209&from=rss
>
> www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/929433.mspx
>
There's an important missing word from that quote: "unexpected".  The
actual advice from Microsoft is "Do not open or save Word files that
you receive from un-trusted or that are received unexpected from
trusted sources." which is perfectly reasonable when there's a 0-day in
the wild.  It says nothing about normal sharing of documents when you
don't suspect it was sent by a worm.


		--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb