Office Tweaks

Some Security Issues with Microsoft Office for Mac 2008

by Jerome Locson on January 27th, 2008

Just a week or two after the launching of Microsoft Office for Mac 2008, some security issues came out with regards to the installers. Here’s a brief info about it:

The issue is that our installer is incorrectly granting ownership of the files to a particular local user as it installs them, so that if your Mac actually has a second local user and that user is not an administrator on your Mac, they could modify your Office 2008 install. [ source ]

Here’s a step-by-step approach if you want to personally update the file ownership settings, this was posted by Erik Schwiebert:

1. Log in to the computer by using a user account with administrator privileges.
2.  In /Applications/Utilities, open Terminal.
3. In the Terminal window, type the following command on one line, and then press RETURN.
   /usr/bin/sudo /bin/chmod -R a-st
   “/Applications/Microsoft Office 2008″
   “/Library/Automator”
   “/Library/Fonts/Microsoft”
   “/Library/Application Support/Microsoft”
4. When prompted, enter the password for the user account that you used to log in in step 1.
5. In the Terminal window, type the following command on one line, and then press RETURN.
   /usr/bin/sudo /usr/sbin/chown -h -R root:admin
   “/Applications/Microsoft Office 2008″
   “/Library/Automator”
   “/Library/Fonts/Microsoft”
   “/Library/Application Support/Microsoft”
6. If prompted, enter the password for the user account that you used to log in in step 1.

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POSTED IN: Mac, Microsoft, Office 12