![]() ![]() Only documents with a file extension ending with “m” - that’s. Documents with these file extensions are not allowed to contain macros. ![]() pptx for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. By default, standard Office documents are saved with the “x” suffix. Since Office 2007, Macros are also much easier to detect. RELATED: 50+ File Extensions That Are Potentially Dangerous on Windows ![]() Office 2013 is set to disable all macros by default, providing a notification that the macro wasn’t allowed to run. Modern versions of Microsoft Office are even more restrictive. By default, only macros signed with a trusted certificate could run. Office 2003 added a macro security level feature. Thankfully, Microsoft eventually got serious about security. How Microsoft Office Protects Against Macro Viruses These macros were much more trouble when Office trusted macros and loaded them by default. Other macro viruses have caused trouble in other ways - for example, the Wazzu macro virus infected Word documents and tampered with them by occasionally moving words around inside the document. Many recipients would open the infected document and the cycle would continue, clogging email servers with an exponentially increasing amount of junk mail. When opened with Word 97 or Word 2000, the macro would execute, gather the first 50 entries in the user’s address book, and mail a copy of the macro-infected Word document to them via Microsoft Outlook. It was distributed as a Word document containing a macro virus. One of the most well-known is the Melissa virus from 1999. RELATED: What ActiveX Controls Are and Why They're Dangerous Macro Viruses In ActionĪs you might expect, malware authors took advantage of such insecurities in Microsoft Office to create malware. Macros and VBA code weren’t designed for security, just like Microsoft’s ActiveX technology and many of the features in Adobe’s PDF Reader. VBA macros were added to Office in the 90s, at a time when Microsoft wasn’t serious about security and before the Internet brought the threat of harmful macros home. You might wonder why such harmful behavior is even possible with an Office suite. In this way, the macro virus can integrate itself into Word, infecting future documents. After a malicious macro is loaded into an Office application like Word via an infected document, it can use features like “AutoExec” to automatically start with Word or “AutoOpen” to automatically run whenever you open a document. ![]()
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