Good day,
At 01:05 PM 8/25/96 -0400, you wrote:
<---- snip ---->
>> In the last year ,however, a new and annoying type of virus has
become
>> widespread. This virus attaches itself to word processing documents created
>> by versions 6 or 7 of the Microsoft Word program. Kuo said the Word viruses
>> attach themselves to files that have a "doc" suffix. These infected "doc"
>> files can travel to and from Macintosh and Windows computers, making
>> them easy to spread.
>> "These are the ones that are really widespread and really causing
>> problems", Kuo said, adding that "95 percent of the Fortune 500 companies
>> have them".
If you use MS Word this might be of some help. If not, you can
delete this message with impunity.
I have seen the Word Virus first hand and found it to be just a
nuisance. When I tried to save an *.doc file, I noticed that Word thought I
was saving a template rather than a document. I looked further and saw the
macros that were the cause of the virus. (What is a macro? It's just a
program that accomplishes a set of tasks. In this case, Word specific
tasks. I've written a group of them (not the virus, though.)). Word
doesn't prevent you from saving a template file with a doc extension, thus
the infected file has a *.doc name. This is one way that the virus is
disguised.
Rather than saving the file, I copied the information from the
document to the clipboard and pasted it into a new document and saved it as
a document. I then deleted the offending file. Why was the offending file
a template? Because the Word virus is spread via Word macros and they can't
be attached to documents, only templates.
I suggest that, to help prevent the problem from occurring, you
might verify that one save option is set to "Prompt to save Normal.Dot" via
the Tools/Options menu in Word. The reason is that the macros try to attach
themselves to your Normal.Dot file which is the standard template that Word
uses. If successful, every document saved will be saved as a template file
(with the doc extension) with the macros attached, thus propagating itself.
If you save an infected document and you leave Word, you will be prompted to
save the updated Normal.Dot template file. Unless you consciously changed
it, probably you ought to respond with a NO to be safe.
If this is a current problem, please contact me offline and I can
walk you through the process to delete the macros and can probably point you
to a little anti-virus program that will clean all documents, as they are
opened, of the macros.
Jeff Jones
[log in to unmask]
