office 2003 and macro viruses


So Microsoft's Office 2003 now apparently lets you embed macros anywhere in the document, making it much harder to scan for viruses, that without mentioning that since the format is more free-form than before, it's more difficult to parse as well for hostile code. Regardless of how clear it is that they can fix this now, instead of later, we can look forward to Office 2005 claiming to be "more secure" by removing some of the obvious security holes they appear ready to leave in the current product.

Categories: technology
Posted by diego on March 24 2003 at 12:08 AM
Comments (please see the comments & trackback policy).

Except that as far as I can see its not hard at all, but it may be time consuming - and we're talking about the shiny new XML format not the existing binary format.

Its XML, the macros will be stored as XML they will use known, defined, tags and so the xpath expression to find them shouldn't be particularly complicated. And its all going to be well structured readable plain text...

So I must be missing something? Or its it just marketing FUD and MS bashing?

Posted by: Murph at March 24, 2003 3:53 PM

Copyright © Diego Doval 2002-2007.
Powered by
Movable Type 3.35