Preface: When you walk through trading floor area, you can see trader writing Python code, said chief digital officer at Nomura.

Background: Perhaps the popularity of the excel usage in trading floors are coincidence. I believe that DDE and Marco functions driven this trend in in past. Audit team found out that a data handling risk of the usage excel spreadsheet in trading floor. A technical term so called excel spreadsheet risk. You may say, that this is an old story!

Current finding on Excel spreadsheet design weakness: Excel query from file feature is vulnerable to “Error” based XML External Entity attacks, if the user chooses the “Import as Html page” functionality upon receiving errors importing a specially crafted XML file. Above scenario will cause unauthorized access control to remote server. Perhaps this is not the external hacker. It is a insider threat. This vulnerability just found, the impact not have official confirmation yet. But we must staying alert!