First OpenOffice Virus, Not In the Wild

NZheretic writes "According to APCmag, the first cross-platform OpenOffice.org virus — 'SB/Badbunny-A' — was emailed directly to Sophos from the virus developers. The proof-of-concept virus affects Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux systems and uses different methods on each. It has not yet been seen in the wild. Despite Sun's OpenOffice.org developer Malte Timmermann's claims to the contrary, this kind of embedded scripting attack represents a real threat to OpenOffice.org users. Back in June 2000 when Sun first announced the open sourcing of OpenOffice.org, the twelfth email to the open discussion list put forward a two-part solution for providing OpenOffice users with Safe(r) Scripting using restricted-mode execution by default and access by signed digital certificates. In October 2000 the issue of treating security as an 'add-on' feature rather than as a 'system property' was again raised. Is it time to now introduce such measures to the OpenOffice.org Core to greatly reduce any future risk from scripted infections?"

Comments

The real problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Scripting itself is a virus that spreads through programmers: once a programmer has seen scripting somewhere it doesn't belong, he feels a sudden urge to add scripting to the project he's working on.

Finally feature compatible with Office

[RobertM1968]

:BEGIN HUMOR:
Well, finally OpenOffice has become a viable Office Suite, having finally added the most notable features of Office, namely script exploit capabilities. It's about time... now there is nothing keeping people from switching to OO!!!
:END HUMOR:

Re:The backdoor from hell

[truthsearch]

I give it about 9 months before something ala SOBig/Blaster hits the *nix scene...

You just conceived it? Congratulations! Do you have a name picked out?

Re:The real solution

[u-bend]

I dunno, doesn't call after the first date, doesn't stick up for you in a debate, cheats on you, and lies about it.

Re:The backdoor from hell

[ettlz]

You just conceived it? Congratulations! Do you have a name picked out?

The "backdoor from hell" already has a name: hello.jpg.

Re:The real solution

[morgan_greywolf]

A untrustworthy website is a website that
- has content linked in (THAT would open a whole can of trust-this-trust-that now would it!)
- has bugs in web, app or db server.
- accepts malicious content including links to content
- you don't know if you can trust everyone with or who could get admin access to that server.

Hmmm...this sounds familiar.

I think you just described Slashdot.

-- a really old /. user who remembers ALL the bugs in slash and MySQL that plagued this site.