by Paul Ducklin on July 7, 2014
"Here's a graph from Szappi's paper showing just how prevalent these so-called macro viruses were until about 2000, when Windows executable malware began to take over:
When you opened an infected document, the malware quietly took control, and set about spreading into your Office template files, from where it could hijack Office in future to sneak a copy of itself into all the documents you edited thereafter.
From Szappi's graph, you can see that macro viruses dropped out of circulation very rapidly at the turn of the century.
Indeed, as Szappi points out in his paper:
In the past five years, macro viruses (and more generally, macro malware) could be considered practically extinct – thanks mostly to the security improvements that were introduced over that period of time to their main target, the Microsoft Office products.But, like so many things in history that exhibit circular behaviour, Szappi noticed that macro malware has been making a return."
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