
What, no "It's 2018 and you can still get pawned by Word documents"? Or is that officially old hat now it's near the end of the year, and we get a three month breather before "It's 2019 and you can still get pawned by Word documents".
Microsoft Word documents can potentially smuggle in malicious code using embedded web videos, it is claimed. Opening a booby-trapped file, and clicking on the vid, will trigger execution of the code. Miscreants can leverage this weakness to potentially trick marks into installing malware on their PCs. It's useful for hackers …
Why would they possibly ever want such as a thing ?
Well, the excuse is license and update monitoring, but I suspect the reality is simply as a backup system for Windows Slurp.
I am *so* against all these background processes that everyone + dog wants installed when you set up their software. There is never ANY information about what it does, why it is needed or how you can prevent that part of the install, it tends to hide in a place where you cannot easily kill it off or control it and authors forever want (without exception) admin level privileges to run it, a sure recipe for problems.
BTW, it's not just a Windows problem. MacOS has that problem too. The issue: anything with admin level can pretty much do as its developers want. If that isn't benign you have a big problem and no means of control.
Dang, that's my rant quota for the month blown :)