Macros in Office are harder for malware usage, but there’s still ways they can get in.
Macros can be highly useful tools in Microsoft Office. Most Microsoft Office macros use Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) or Excel 4.0 macros (XLM). These programming and macro languages have a surprising amount of access to system resources on Windows machines, especially considering they only run from within Microsoft Office . The benefit to these macros is to simplify complex functionality, such as automation in Microsoft Excel or field validation in forms that may have been integrated into a Microsoft Word document, to name a few.Despite their usefulness, however, macros are often used to deploy malware as well, because they are capable of downloading and executing external software. Because most Office applications can integrate with each other, a macro can grab your Address book from Outlook, for example, and allow whatever malware you may have been infected to send malicious payloads to your contacts. Microsoft’s dominance in the productivity and operating systems spaces has made their software rich targets for a very long time, with the angle of attack often bring macros.
