All linking between Office files, in all versions of Office, relies on OLE linking. It is quite robust.

Your 'alleged' experts should demonstrate an alternative strategy for end users if they truly believe security is an issue. Sure, OLE links can be spoofed, but an outsider can't do it to your document. The only other risk of significance is that the linked file will be replaced, either deliberately or unintentionally, leading to data loss/corruption - but then you'll likely have lost the source file too... in which case you have other issues to deal with and, once those are resolved and the source file restored, the links too will be restored.

The presence of "OLE_LINK97" in one of your links is of no consequence; what that represents is nothing more than a bookmark name created by Word so that the target document can reference the correct range in the source document. You could just as easily use any other valid bookmark name. The Excel equivalent is "BS!R102C1:R120C11"; if you named the Excel range, you could use that name instead - named ranges in Excel are the equivalent of Word bookmarks in this context.

For updating the links, there's really only one issue to consider: are the filenames & paths the same. If so, there's nothing to update. If not, for a once-off exercise, you could use Alt-F9 to expose the links and use Find/Replace to update them, but Alt-F9 doesn't work for all links, or add the Edit Links button to Word's QAT and use that. the Alt-F9 & Find/Replace approach would handle most links and you could use the Edit Links button for the remainder.

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Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]