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Microsoft observed a significant increase in macros based malware

  • January 5, 2015
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by Pierluigi Paganini on January 5th, 2015
 

The Microsoft Malware Protection Center (MMPC) has recently observed a surge in the infections of malware using macros to spread their malicious code.

The Microsoft Malware Protection Center (MMPC) is warning Office users on the diffusion of malicious macros through email attachments or social engineering websites. A macro is a series of commands and instructions that could be grouped in a single command to accomplish frequently used tasks automatically.
In the recent months, the experts at MMPC have observed a significant increase in enable-macros based malware, the most active codes include Adnel and Tarbir.
“Two recent macro downloaders that we have seen spreading through spam email campaigns areTrojanDownloader:W97M/Adnel and TrojanDownloader:O97M/Tarbir. These recent campaigns are one example of an increasing trend of macro malware targeting home users and enterprise customers. These threats predominantly target our customers in the US and UK.” states the official blog post published by Microsoft.
Both malware was detected in several attacks targeting the US- and UK-based home users and enterprise customers.
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    • retiredAntus67
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    • January 6, 2015
    By Brian Prince on January 05, 2015
     
    Researchers at Microsoft are reporting a spike in the use of macros to spread malware via spam and social engineering.
    The increase occurred during the past month. Last year, researchers at Sophos also detected an increase in macro-based malware.
    "Using macros in Microsoft Office can help increase productivity by automating some processes," according to the Microsoft Malware Protection Center. "However, malware authors have also exploited these capabilities. Since Microsoft set the default setting to "Disable all macros with notification", the number of macro-related malware threat has declined. More recently we have seen new threats emerging that include some form of social engineering to convince users to manually enable macros and allow the malicious code to run."
     
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