Word 98 Insecurity

[mike () WOWDX NET (Mike)]

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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| Mike Morton       DXStorm Geek Team Leader       |
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| mike () dxstorm com  | DXShop ...Open For Business! |
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