Macro or Virus?

[ed]

For a colleague, I created a simple letterhead template with jpg logos
pasted into the header and footer.

When she emails a document created with this template to others, the
email is either bounced or the recipient gets the "This document
contains macros" message. I didn't intentionally put a macro in the
document.

Could Word be creating a macro automatically that I don't know about?
Or is there a macro virus infecting the file? How can I tell?

Ed

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Hi Ed:

Yes, there are viruses that infect JPEGs. If you have a good anti-virus
solution on your Mac, it will find them.

If I were you, my first step would be to install a serious Antivirus and let
it do a deep system scan.

However, the viruses that infect JPEGs and GIFs are quite rare. It is
somewhat unlikely that you are REALLY infected, unless you spend a lot of
time on Instant Messaging or in Chat rooms (or your kids do...). There are
also a few websites out there you wouldn't want to visit... For example,
websites offering "Free" or "Pirated" or "Warezd" or "Cracked" software
often give you more software than you thought you were going to get

Much more likely is the fact that the people these JPEGs are being sent to
are behind a corporate firewall. These days, firewalls routinely bounce or
complain about emails containing a wide variety of content, JPEGs and GIFs
are amongst them.

I have learned through sad experience that the sort of person who wastes
bandwidth on pretty graphics in their emails is usually not sufficiently
computer-skilled to properly maintain their anti-virus protection. Some
such people don't run ANY anti-virus at all (there still are a few out
there...).

So only authenticated senders can send anything other than plain text to my
email address. Every other kind of content is stripped on the way in.

Life's too short to spend two or three days rebuilding my network from
backups each time I get an email from such people, just because there are
still people on the Internet who cannot learn

Unfortunately, the news media did us all a major disservice years ago by
pushing the line that you're "safe if you don't open the email". That never
was true: these things have always been able to infect a system just by
"arriving". I run both a firewall and an Antivirus

Hope this helps

For a colleague, I created a simple letterhead template with jpg logos
pasted into the header and footer.

When she emails a document created with this template to others, the
email is either bounced or the recipient gets the "This document
contains macros" message. I didn't intentionally put a macro in the
document.

Could Word be creating a macro automatically that I don't know about?
Or is there a macro virus infecting the file? How can I tell?

Ed

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word and Word Macintosh]]

Ed:

Sorry: Afterthought...

Yes, it is possible that the document itself contains a macro virus. It is
possible that your Normal template contains a macro virus. If it does,
chances are every other document on your system contains its own personal
copy...

Again, a deep scan with a good antivirus will spot that immediately and fix
it for you.

Microsoft Word itself will warn its user if there could "possibly" be a
virus in a document. This is a very simple check that is not necessarily
definitive. It can't give false negatives, but it can generate false
positives

A Word document is a series of nested "containers". Word checks for the
presence of the "Customisations" container, which contains macros and
toolbars among other things. If it finds that container, it generates the
warning; whether there are any macros in the container or not.

One thing that often catches us on the Mac is when we customize the toolbars
or keystrokes. These changes go into that container, and generate the
warning.

However, such changes are normally saved only to the Normal template. They
are NOT copied to the documents you produce unless you explicitly do this.
So, unless you have inadvertently sent your colleague a template instead of
a document, she won't get that container unless you (intentionally) put it
there.

You may want to ask her to send a copy back to you. When you get it, ignore
the file extension and try to "Save" it. If Word immediately forces you to
save in the "My Templates" folder, internally the file is a template,
regardless of what the extension says.

To fix that, allow it to save in My Templates, then create a new document
from it and send that back to her.

Cheers

For a colleague, I created a simple letterhead template with jpg logos
pasted into the header and footer.

When she emails a document created with this template to others, the
email is either bounced or the recipient gets the "This document
contains macros" message. I didn't intentionally put a macro in the
document.

Could Word be creating a macro automatically that I don't know about?
Or is there a macro virus infecting the file? How can I tell?

Ed

--

Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.

John McGhie <[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410