Found a short and interesting webcast on how to gather metadata such as usernames from documents created with Office 2007 over at PaulDotCom:
Hack Naked TV – Episode 2 – Office 2007 Metadata from PaulDotCom on Vimeo.
As you might know, the new MS Office format (.docx etc.) is based on a zipped structure of XML files. These XML files contain everything from the structure of the document, the data in it and of course the metadata of the document. Previous versions of MS Office has been known to divulge a bit too much information, and this webcast focuses on digging out user data that might be used in remote pen-testing.
The webcast only illustrates digging for usernames, but as we all know, more information might be hidden (even though it looks cleaner)
Anyways, if you’re on windows and want investigate your own files you can just use WinZip, WinRAR or any other archiver to extract the files inside your .docx/.xlsx/etc-x files. XML files can be manually interpreted using notepad++, Internet Explorer or other more specialized tools.
Cheers,
