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

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.