Greg Linares, who goes by the handle Laughing Mantis, shared a funny story on X on how he and his teammates announced a major zero-day Office 2007 vulnerability only to find that it was a mistake on their part. To save their reputation, jobs, and perhaps even the business, they had to scramble to find a real bug. This happened in late 2006, when Linares was working with digital security firm eEye, and they were testing the new Microsoft Office suite for vulnerabilities.
As eEye is one of the leading institutions in threat management, it was the company’s job to see if the latest version of one of the most widely used corporate software suites at that time had any zero-day flaws. Within 36 hours of the launch, Linares found a bug in the Word Art conversion function, which Word uses to convert old Word Art structures into modern ones for Office 2007.
