Malicious Mobile Code

Risk Assessment -- High

This should come as no surprise with the popularity of macro viruses. Not only are they widespread, but they can do almost anything to a PC with their payload routines. The inclusion of signed digital macros and the ever-increasing security in Office 2000 will help, but the use of those new features will be slow in coming in most environments. Because history has proven that end users do not know how to treat macro virus warning messages appropriately, you should set security to high wherever possible. The risk to any environment from macro viruses is high, not only from their sheer numbers, but from what they have yet to try. The world is their oyster.

The Future of Macro Viruses

There are lots of exploits that virus writers are just starting to explore, and antivirus researchers are just waiting. Some methods deal with what a macro virus can do on the local machine, others work with the ways they could exploit the Windows infrastructure. Microsoft Office applications are becoming more and more Internet-friendly all the time. Office documents now have the ability to host web scripts. Web scripts allow developers to use Office documents to provide dynamic content to web pages. The Microsoft Office 2000 Developer Kit even contains WebBot components to use Dynamic HTML to create interactive web pages in Office without advanced coding. Web scripts, which can be written in VBScript, JavaScript, etc., are represented in documents by a visual icon called a ...