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Office 2003 Service Pack Disables Older File Formats | |
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| Time: 00:39 EST/05:39 GMT | News Source: WinBeta | Posted By: Kenneth van Surksum | ||
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In Service Pack 3 for Office 2003, Microsoft disabled support for many older file formats. If you have old Word, Excel, 1-2-3, Quattro, or Corel Draw documents, watch out! They did this because the old formats are 'less secure', which actually makes some sense, but only if you got the files from some untrustworthy source. Naturally, they did this by default, and then documented a mind-bogglingly complex workaround (KB 938810) rather than providing a user interface for adjusting it, or even a set of awkward 'Do you really want to do this?' dialog boxes to click through. And of course because these are, after all, old file formats ... many users will encounter the problem only months or years after the software change, while groping around in dusty and now-inaccessible archives. | ||
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| #1 By 17996 (66.235.18.153) at 1/2/2008 1:20:57 AM |
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This was a good defense-in-depth move by Microsoft--should help to mitigate many future exploits. Hackers are having enough of a field day exploiting bugs in Office's parsing of its own file formats, just think of the fun they would have if they turned their attention to these ancient file format converters!
Good to see "security by default" and "security over functionality" at work. |
| #2 By 8556 (12.208.163.138) at 1/2/2008 9:59:39 AM |
| I have files going back 15 years, when I started my business. If I need to open them I don't want to wait by having to hack the registry before opening the first one. My hundreds of saved files offer no security risk to me or my business. MS should have allowed the user a choice between MS's definition of security or user flexibility when installing Office 2003 SP3. This is another annoying action by MS, almost as bad, but not as enduring, as not adding an "Always Allow" choice along with "Cancel or Allow" on Vista. |
| #3 By 2231 (72.5.151.4) at 1/2/2008 12:01:09 PM |
| A file format is not insecure. The issue is that Microsoft is shipping insecure code in Office 2007 and 2003 which may break when these files are opened and allow malicious executable code to run in the user's security context. Rather than fix this insecure code in a shipping product, their policy is to turn off the code and tell the user, "if you want to take the risk, turn it back on, but we won't make it easy." |
| #4 By 95132 (76.17.38.128) at 1/2/2008 11:16:51 PM |
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We ran into this problem back in November, discovered the change which was preventing a customer's winword2.0 doc from opening.. (why so old who knows). Anyway a quick GP edit and problem solved for most our organization.
This isn't a big deal, the only thing that was annoying was this wasn't really announced or well published ahead of the SP. I like the ability to disable the older formats and frankly if we didn't have one of our major customers constantly sending us crap in winword2.0 format (which frankly they could just send in ascii) we'd left it off and dealt with it on a user by user basis. Would have been nice if MS just added a check box buried in the options screens to set the past format security level. |
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