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I imagine AppArmor is configured to minimize the access that LibreOffice has to the rest of the system. Otherwise yeah, vanilla LO is probably not any better than MS Office.

VServer or similar could also work well but might be harder to configure correctly.

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If 90+% of a journalist's job is to open documents from sources in an office program, what good does it do to cage exploits in to LibreOffice? Those exploits still get virtually all the data an attacker wants from the journalist.

The data still has to get out though. If LibreOffice doesn't have network access then that can't happen, at least not without an attack on some other systems as well. This protects against generic sort of "drive-by" attacks but if someone is being targeted then yeah, sandboxing the office suite isn't enough.

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