Me: It's not just hearsay that MSWord files can sometimes convey unintended data, because .doc is just a big core dump, and some of the allocated memory wasn't wiped before the OS passed it to MSWord, right?
I've known people who would just run strings(1) on .doc-format résumés that people would send in, and see all sorts of things.Bloom: Yeah, I found out what my boss was making that way once.
Me: Wow!
Bloom: i had no msword viewer and got my offer letter, and it had his offer letter in it [...] So I found out that my boss was making [massive figure deleted] a month. And later I revealed this to him.
Me: What'd he say?
Bloom: He laughed. But it made him nervous. It was his boss that had made the mistake; he's a unix guy himself.
Me: And you told him how you found it out?
Bloom: Yep.
Me: Wow. So if you'd opened that file in MSWord, you'd not have seen that data of his, but it was there in
strings filename |lessor whatever?Bloom: Yes.