Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/05/05/p-code-r-us.html
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Wait, Evil Clippy is Clippy with a goatee, right?
Wouldn’t that make him the good one?
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He would be the best clippy in the evil universe if he had a goatee of course. But it’s still the evil universe.
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It’s the only one we’ve got… apparently.
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Mirror universe Clippy?
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There is no file type that Microsoft hasn’t made executable at some point. Office files, XML, midi… There’s probably some backdoor to Notepad to execute txt files.
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Technically an IE exploit, but it is triggered by trying to open a txt file!
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On what planet?
Huuughhh, the joke is that Clippy is already evil, so Evil Clippy must be…
…Jebuz… though crowd.
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Just looking at the fake Clippy sets off the agonizer…
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I got nothing.
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undetectable malicious Microsoft Office docs
- Load VM system image
- Open target document
- See if anything changes
If it’s malicious, it has to do something, right? Can’t it be detected by just watching what it does?
Without a goatee there’s literally no way to know.
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What if it’s programmed to do nothing until it has been running for a few days? Or until it’s running after a predetermined day in the future?
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Perhaps it is more “End of Level Boss Clippy”. Or maybe “Chaotic Evil Clippy”, a foil for the original “Lawful Evil Clippy”: a Joker-like paperclip that was once straghtened out to free a floppy on a Mac, and has never been the same since. I’m sure Alan Moore could flesh out the backstory if we asked nicely…
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Sure, absolutely.
But my existential point stands: software maliciousness is a consequence of the actions that software takes, and these actions are (eventually, per your point) something that can be observed.
Not easily detectable, nor detectable in a reasonable timeframe — these are valid alternate labels. But straight-up undetectable malware is a misnomer. If it doesn’t ultimately do anything bad, it wasn’t malicious in the first place.
ETA: I’m almost certainly suffering from a bout of argumentative pedantry. Just ignore me.
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I started using OpenOffice back in the day. Why pay a lot for something when a near equivalent is free and available? Like practically everyone else (including the employees) I fled to LibreOffice when Oracle acquired OpenOffice, which these days seems a bit moribund even if it is being run by Apache now . So my question is, is this attack vector something that can be used in either LibreOffice or OpenOffice? I do understand that many people have to use MSOffice due to that being what the company uses and/or because it might be better at being useful for collaborations.
That’s too specific. I’d consider a BAT file to be executable.
It doesn’t really matter if it’s native, bytecode, interpreted, script…
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Somebody in that company already sold the code for this to a hacker before the ink was dry. In the next 6 months there will be a tidal wave of machines being corrupted by bad .doc files. Bet on it.
