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.
#WHAT IS A MACRO IN EXCEL 2007 PDF#
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. For example, macros can use the VBA SHELL command to run arbitrary commands and programs or use the VBA KILL command to delete files on your hard drive.Īfter 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. You might assume that a programming language designed to automate tasks in an Office suite would be fairly harmless, but you’d be wrong. Why Can Macros Do Potentially Dangerous Things? They could then embed these macros in Office documents and distribute them online. However, malicious people could write VBA code to create macros that do harmful things. Macros you’ve created yourself are fine and don’t pose a security risk. Follow our guide to creating Excel macros for more information. This allows you to automate repetitive tasks - in the future, you’ll be able to repeat the actions you recorded by running the macro. You can record your own macros using the built-in Macro Recorder. Microsoft Office documents - Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other types of documents - can contain embedded code written in a programming language known as Visual Basic for Applications (VBA).
#WHAT IS A MACRO IN EXCEL 2007 HOW TO#
RELATED: Learn How to Use Excel Macros to Automate Tedious Tasks
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