To establish a secure computing environment, you must make sure that your applications and data are not vulnerable to malicious attacks. By using the security options in Office 2008, you can establish a security-enhanced environment by limiting the possible avenues of attack.
This guide presents many different methods to mitigate security threats that will help you limit direct attacks on data from external and internal sources. An important part of implementing these methods is training users about how to protect themselves and the company from attack. This training usually builds user awareness of security issues, and establishes ownership of the data that users want to protect. For example, you can educate your users to distinguish between low-risk files and high-risk files. Low risk files can be internal documents that may not contain malicious content, such as documents from colleagues or business partners. High-risk documents are documents from unknown people or documents that pass through an unsecured Internet connection. It is important that users evaluate risks and mitigate potential security threats. Users shouldn't treat both types of files the same way.
There are no administrative settings that allow you to enforce security preferences that you specify. Even if you set and deploy security preferences, users can change these preferences at a later time. Therefore, if you are deploying security settings as part of your organization's policy, you must educate your users about the risks associated with changing default settings. Without proper training, users can expose an organization to unauthorized or malicious use of its data. Establishing a corporate policy for how files are distributed and handled helps mitigate security vulnerabilities caused by untrained users.
Before you plan and implement a security-enhanced environment, it is important to understand the different types of security threats. The following sections of this topic list potential security threats in today’s computing environment. The rest of the Security chapter addresses how to plan for a secure computing environment and how you can configure the security options in Office 2008 to help address security concerns.
 | Privacy threats |
| Document threats |
| Code threats |
| External threats |
