Gabor Szappanos looks at the resurgence of malicious VBA macros that use social engineering to activate.
Macro malware had long been assumed dead. After all, macros are disabled by default in modern versions of
Microsoft Office
, which means they do not automatically execute upon opening a file.
However, macro malware has recently made a comeback. Earlier this year, we
wrote
about a report from the National Cyber Security Center in the Netherlands, on the resurgence of macro malware in targeted attacks. In April, Gabor Szappanos, a researcher from
Sophos
in Hungary, published a
paper
on the use of macros as an infection vector in the Napolar campaign.
Today, we publish a new paper by Gabor, in which he takes another look at recent macro malware. He shows how malware authors have discovered that, in many cases, fancy exploitation isn’t needed: some simple social engineering suffices to make recipients enable the macros, upon which the actual payload is downloaded onto the victim’s system.
Remember that as of this month, all papers published through Virus Bulletin are available free of charge. You can download this paper
here
in HTML format, or
here
as a PDF (no registration required).
Posted on 07 July 2014 by
Martijn Grooten
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