After Decades of Abuse, Microsoft Adds an Anti-Macro-Malware Feature To Office (softpedia.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft is finally addressing the elephant in the room in terms of security for Office users and has announced a new feature in the Office 2016 suite that will make it harder for attackers to exploit macro malware. Sysadmins can now use group policies to disable the execution of macro scripts that retrieve content off the Internet, a tactic used by malware developers to trick users into allowing the download & automatic installation of malware on their PCs. "Macro malware" as this category is known, is the preferred method of distribution for most malware these days, especially ransomware.

Comments

Sadly needed

[phishybongwaters]

It's sad that we actually need them to provide this, but users are idiots. Users click buttons. Users click "agree". Users click "run macro" users ignore "this could be dangerous". Lets go a step further and just straight up remove macros completely. There is no need for macro support, no one actually uses these features other than malware. Get rid of it.

Re:Sadly needed

[Coisiche]

There is no need for macro support, no one actually uses these features

I've certainly never required one for Word but there have been several occasions where something I wanted to do in Excel could only be achieved by writing a macro. Oh sure, I perhaps *could* have managed without resorting to a macro but one instance I'd have probably still have been working on the task several years later... on the other hand maybe I wouldn't have been made redundant from that job if I hadn't tried to be efficient.

Re:Sadly needed

[Z00L00K]

And Microsoft has also made this possible by hiding the extension of files in the UIs making it a lot easier for evil people to trick stupid people into clicking on files that they think are images but actually are an executable.

And, of course. . . .

[Salgak1]

. . . no fixing extant versions of Office out there, and managing it by **GROUP POLICY**?? Really ? I guess that either:

(1) Home and student users are immune to macro viruses, or

(2) Microsoft is only worried about the security of its' corporate clients. . .

Re:And, of course. . . .

[kaur]

Dear Microsoft.
Please give us an example where a home user would benefit from the capability of Office documents to load anything from the web.
Does this benefit outweight the risk it creates?
How?

In other words -
DROP THIS BLOAT from your software, for all and for good.
With the exception of corporate users who, in a strictly controlled environment, might use it - GPO allowing.

Software industry is a joke

[Solandri]

Manufacturing industry: Government says "Your product is dangerous. Come up with a fix and issue a recall at your expense to implement your fix in every product out there that you sold."

Toy industry: Government says "Your product is dangerous. Pull it off the market. Have the people who bought it return it, and give them their money back."

Software industry: "Our product is dangerous. I know! Let's fix it, but only put the fix in our latest version to force people to upgrade and pay us more money." Government says "Great! We'd like to buy a million copies of the new version."

Given Microsoft's history with free security updates, I thought they understood the difference between a bug fix and a feature upgrade. But between this and rolling out unwanted adware and spyware as "important updates" I guess not.

Re:Software industry is a joke

[rcase5]

The government requires auto manufacturers to have safety features that protect people in the event of a collision. A collision isn't considered "normal use", but they are required to safeguard against injury in the event of a collision. The spate of recalls due to defective airbags from Takata can be an example of a product feature being fixed that is supposed to deploy outside of normal use. Whether or not the collision is malicious is besides the point.

Internet access?

[denbesten]

I have never understood why macros need access to the Internet or to run an external program. Personally, I would rather be prompted if a macros needs to connect outside of the document. It would make more sense to me than telling me that a document is scary simply because I emailed it to my self via gmail,

Crap topping on a turd sundae

[rcase5]

This is typical of Microsoft. They introduce "features" which sound really cool, but in actual practice are ill-advised. Then they introduce band-aid solutions that are supposed to make up for these deficiencies, but really don't do anything except get in the way of normal usage, and insult the intelligence of users. The issue with Office macros has been around for about 20 years, and they have been attempting to fix the security holes ever since, to no effect. This is why Windows is such a sieve when it comes to security, because they've designed Windows with the same philosophy as all of their other products, including Office.

Re:Turn them off by default

[azcoyote]

Yeah, as a professor I use macros a lot for common tasks in writing papers and for managing my gradebook. The main problem with macros is that they are so stupidly designed and VBA is such a stupid, inconsistent, and insecure language. Macros are already disabled by default until you enable them via a popup, but there is no distinction between harmless operations and dangerous ones that could compromise a user's system. I think Visual Basic needs to be replaced with another language, and macro security needs to be redesigned from the ground up. But Microsoft never does anything so sensible.