Microsoft Releases OLE Security Patch for Mac Office 98

Microsoft Corporation has released an OLE update for English language versions of Microsoft Office 98 for Macintosh designed to prevent OLE applications from storing extraneous data – possibly including email, financial data, or other sensitive information – within document files. (See "Oil of OLE: Document Security and You" in TidBITS-437 for a complete description of the problem.) Although the revised version of OLE corrects the extraneous data problem for all applications which use OLE (including PageMaker and previous versions of Office applications), Microsoft’s updater application copies the necessary files to your hard disk then requires the Microsoft Office First Run application to actually install the files. As a result, unless you have Microsoft Office 98, this updater apparently cannot be used to install the revised version of OLE for use with other applications. The update is available in MacBinary (3.3 MB) or BinHex (4.5 MB) formats, and also includes a previously released fix for Visual Basic for Applications that corrected a problem with the Office 98’s Memo and Résumé Wizards.