Microsoft GZA-00006 Best practices for a security-enhanced environment, External threats, 107

Office 2008 Security

External threats

External threats can include threat agents such as hyperlinks, embedded objects in e-mails, and data connections that link a document to another document, database, or Web site across an intranet or public network.

External threats are a risk if your organization:

•Provides users with unrestricted access to public networks, such as the Internet.

•Allows users to receive e-mail messages that contain embedded images and HTML.

•Allows users to use data connections in spreadsheets or other documents.

For information about planning and configuring security settings that mitigate threats from external agents, see Configure external program access to Entourage 2008 in the Office 2008 Planning section.

Best practices for a security-enhanced environment

The following table lists some best practices for enhancing the security of the computing environment in your organization.

Best practice	Consideration
Educate and train	There are no administrative settings that allow you to enforce
users about the	security preferences that you specify. Even if you set and
security settings that	deploy security preferences, users can change these
are available to	preferences at a later time. Therefore, if you are deploying
protect their	security settings as part of your organization's policy, you must
documents.	educate your users about the risks associated with changing
	default settings.

Install all available updates.

Turn on AutoUpdate to receive security patches or updates.

For more information about how to use the automatic update feature in Office 2008, see Configuring AutoUpdate for Office 2008 in the Office 2008 Deployment section.

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