First StarOffice Virus Sighted

Sam Haine '95 writes "News.com is reporting on the creation of Stardust, a virus which uses macros to attack StarOffice, Sun's office suite. The malware was written as a proof-of-concept code to show what might be possible rather than as a serious attempt to create a new attack vector." From the article: "The pest is written in Star Basic. It downloads an image file with adult content from the Internet and opens that file in a new document, according to Kaspersky's posting."

Comments

Losing data is always the real problem.

[khasim]

If you're in a company and a "virus" takes out one of the system files on one of your servers ... but the data is safe, you have less of a problem than if a "virus" leaves the server intact, but deletes all of your data.

It's always about the security of the data.

Which is why part of the OS's job is to restrict the ability of regular users as much as possible.

When all that is in danger is your personal home directory, that's really as good as the OS can be.

If we're talking single user/home machines ... the risk is greater that your hard drive will fail before you get a "virus" on your Linux box. With a failed hard drive (and no backup), you've lost all your data. At some point, it is up to the admin (the user in this case) to back-up his/her data. There is a point at which the OS/app's responsibility ends and the admin's begins.