MS Office Privacy Issues : New Evidence Eliminator program upgrade v5.058 for Office 2003

Announcing a new program upgrade v5.058

Keep a step ahead of the ongoing Microsoft Office changes that threaten your confidentiality and privacy.

Evidence Eliminator's new enhanced product version 5.058, released in October 2003, meets the challenges of the ongoing MS Office 2003 privacy issues that unknowingly confront the average user.

Evidence Eliminator is designed to work with all Microsoft Windows Operating Systems and the following programs.

The latest version 5.058 update is fully compatible with MS Office 2003. Plug-in tools are available to capture history data for many other programs such as video movie players, or create your own Custom Plugins.

For use with AOL, Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer 6.0 Microsoft Windows XP 2000 Pro 95 98 ME NT4, MS Outlook, Outlook Express, MS Office 2003, Windows Media Player, Real Player, and loads more program Plug-ins!

Why should anyone be concerned about personal privacy and confidentiality when using MS Office products? Well lets look a now famous example from recent world history!!!

Microsoft Word bytes Tony Blair in the butt

Excerpts from the "computer bytes man.com" used under the Berne Convention

"Microsoft Word documents are notorious for containing private information. The British government of Tony Blair just learned this lesson the hard way.

"February 2003, 10 Downing Street published a dossier on Iraq's security and intelligence organizations. ..........

"Blair's government made one additional mistake: they published the dossier as a Microsoft Word file on their Web site. I decided to try to learn who had worked on the document. I downloaded the Word file containing the dossier from the 10 Downing Street Web site and found the following revision log in the file:


         Rev. #1: "cic22" edited file "C:\DOCUME~1\phamill\LOCALS~1\
                            ...\Temp\AutoRecovery save of Iraq - security.asd" 
 Rev. #2: "cic22" edited file "C:\DOCUME~1\phamill\LOCALS~1\
                            ...\Temp\AutoRecovery save of Iraq - security.asd"
 Rev. #3: "cic22" edited file "C:\DOCUME~1\phamill\LOCALS~1\
                            ...\Temp\AutoRecovery save of Iraq - security.asd" 
 Rev. #4: "JPratt" edited file "C:\TEMP\Iraq - security.doc" 
 
 Rev. #5: "JPratt" edited file "A:\Iraq - security.doc" 

 Rev. #6: "ablackshaw" edited file "C:\ABlackshaw\Iraq - security.doc" 

 Rev. #7: "ablackshaw" edited file "C:\ABlackshaw\A;Iraq - security.doc"

 Rev. #8: "ablackshaw" edited file "A:\Iraq - security.doc" 

 Rev. #9: "MKhan" edited file "C:\TEMP\Iraq - security.doc"   

 Rev. #10: "MKhan" edited file "C:\WINNT\Profiles\mkhan\Desktop\Iraq.doc"

      "Most Word document files contain a revision log which is a listing of 
      the last 10 edits of a document, showing the names of the people who 
      worked with the document and the names of the files that the document went 
      under. Revision logs are hidden and cannot be viewed in Microsoft Word. 
      However I wrote a small utility for extracting and displaying revision 
      logs and other hidden information in Word .DOC files.  
      "It is easy to spot the following four names in the revision log of the 
      Blair dossier: 
      
        P. Hamill

        J. Pratt

        A. Blackshaw

        M. Khan 
      
      "In addition, the "cic22" in the first three entries of the revision log 
      stands for "Communications Information Centre," a unit of the British 
      Government. 
      "During the week of June 23, 2003, the British Parliament held hearings 
      of the Blair Dossier and other PR efforts by the UK Government leading up 
      to the Iraq war. Alastair Campbell of the UK Communications Information 
      Centre was put in the hot seat and had to explain the dossier plagiarism 
      and details of the revision log.  
      "One of the interesting tidbits that came out of the hearings is that 
      John Pratt provided the dossier on a floppy disk to Alison Blackshaw to 
      give to Colin Powell for his presentation before the United Nations. 
      The 
      revision log shows the document being copied from Pratt's hard drive to a 
      floppy disk in revisions #4 and #5.  
      "The Blair government learned its lesson well with regard to publishing 
      Microsoft Word documents. Another report on Iraq that was published in 
      June 2003 was only available as a PDF file. 
      "As a general rule, Word document files which are converted to RTF 
      files, HTML files, or PDF files will not contain revision logs and other 
      metadata." [end quote]

So what we see here is just one of many of the privacy vulnerabilities that occurs in Microsoft Office products. Generally these add-on features are designed to be user friendly to assist people in making the most of their computer software.

However, ease of use can often become a confidentiality nightmare for people, especially when we don't really know what is going on behind the scenes in this type of technology.

Now Microsoft make excellent products for the average person, but it is critical today for people at home or in the small business office to be aware of the many security and privacy vulnerabilities lurking silently on your computer.

A more detailed article on our Secure File Deletion page covers many issues including this:

When a file is written to a hard disk, or a floppy disk, it has a certain number of sectors or clusters allocated to it. The area of disk space provided, is always larger than the file size itself. Deleting the file alone, leaves a space which will still contain sensitive data about the file.

There are a number of ways in which this sensitive file data can be deposited without a user knowing it. It is in the nature of a computer, to always be updating one file or another. Every time a file is updated or "saved", new copies are created and written wherever there is sufficient space.

Software applications [ the many different programs on your pc such as MS Office ] can create huge numbers of such files. When a file is eventually deleted, only the LAST FILE IMAGE is actually deleted from hard disk.

All other previous file "images" then appear as free disk space according to the computer system, but in fact, those file copies/images, plus the additional recorded data about those files, are still fully present on the hard drive........ and are fully recoverable!

This type of file data is continually being created and stored on the hard drive, unseen and unknown about by the average user. That is until a disk is viewed with the appropriate recovery software; then is all is revealed! Even when partially overwritten by the computer system later, these files can still clearly be identified for what they are and can make interesting reading!

Now, if the above wasn't already enough of a surprise, most program applications, and especially Microsoft Office programs, also create "temporary" files as part of their normal operation. But these files are not as temporary as they may sound, because they are never physically deleted in the file system or the hard drive by the application, or the computer system itself. At least not without specifically being done so by the user. Of course, they never tell you to do that, do they?

Current file deletion utilities, attempt to address this problem of "data remanence", with varying degrees of success. If you are using Windows, like 95% of people do, then most of these cheap hard drive cleaner programs offer very little or no security at all........ with the exception of Evidence Eliminator's hard drive utility for Windows.

Please see the full article here:
Why is secure file deletion so critical for personal computer privacy?

Please see this site for more information about today's most common Internet Privacy Risks and Windows security flaws

The latest version of Evidence Eliminator 5.058 addresses even more of these security risks in Microsoft Windows XP, and MS Office 2003 in particular.

For more information about how Evidence Eliminator can protect your privacy, please browse these links below, or check the site menu on the top right of this page.

EVIDENCE ELIMINATOR PC CLEANING Features Benefits | Erase Windows Internet Explorer History Files

FREE EVIDENCE ELIMINATOR DOWNLOAD Options

HARD DRIVE CLEANER WARNING Window Washer Internet Cleanup Quick Clean Surf Secret

Windows XP Registry Cleaner Guide with Evidence Eliminator

ERASING HARD DRIVE GUIDE How to erase hard drive completely clean with free software

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