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

Learning period

[suv4x4]

The more open source products get used, the more their authors will realize that it's not enough to be l33t to write a secure product.

It will also require tough and down-to-the-ground tough work such as researching the worms out there and patching the product out.

Another thing is: you can never "fix" the user, there will always be the guys to run attached executables that promise hot porn and FREE MONY!.

Re:it's still basically a OS security issue

[Otter]

If this happened on a Un*x machine (Sun, HP, Linux, BSD), the damage would be confined and limited to what the user had unprotected. It would be highly unusual for a Un*x user hit with a StarOffice macro exploit to have enough exposure to compromise the system.

We have this discussion all the time, but once more can't hurt: on single-user Linux systems or Unix workstations, losing $HOME is far more serious than losing system files.

Re:it's still basically a OS security issue

[anagama]

If this happened on a Un*x machine (Sun, HP, Linux, BSD), the damage would be confined and limited to what the user had unprotected. It would be highly unusual for a Un*x user hit with a StarOffice macro exploit to have enough exposure to compromise the system.

For me, the system is the least valuable area. I have system cds and if it gets borked, I can reinstall and reconfigure. A hassle "yes", end of the world "no". What concerns me is all the irreplaceable content in my home directory. In my home dir, I have all the privileges I need to ruin it all. Now, I keep backups because I know that all computers always fail (at some point in time), but most people are pretty cavalier about backing up stuff. Of course, when I backup, I only backup my data because really, the system is stupidly easy to replace. A person who loses all their baby pics due to a malicious macro isn't really going to care that their printer config is still good.