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This article is from the Computer viruses FAQ, by David Harley D.Harley@icrf.icnet.uk, George Wenzel gwenzel@telusplanet.net and Bruce Burrell bpb@umich.edu with numerous contributions by others.

10) Does anyone know about macro viruses?

Macro viruses and trojans are specific to certain
applications which use sophisticated macro languages,
rather than being specific to a particular operating
system. Macro viruses comprise a high percentage of
the viruses now in the wild.

Most current macro viruses and trojans are specific to
Microsoft Word and Excel: however, many applications,
not all of them Windows applications, have potentially
damaging and/or infective macro capabilities too.

Macro languages such as WordBasic and Visual Basic for
Applications (VBA) are powerful programming languages in
their own right. Word and Excel are particularly vulnerable
to this threat, due to the way in which the macro language
is bound to the command/menu structure in vulnerable versions
of Word, the way in which macros and data can exist in the
same file, and the eccentricities of OLE-2.

For further info on macro viruses, you might like to try
the main antivirus vendor sites.

 

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