OpenOffice.org Engineering’s report on the much reported StarOffice/OpenOffice.org virus:

It doesn’t start When the file is loaded, the user is asked if to enable macros from this document. Even if the user choose “yes”, there is no autostart of any macro.
It doesn’t do anything special When the user manually starts the macro, the only thing that happens is that an Image should be loaded into a new document, and some text is written in the current document. That’s all!
No self reproduction There is some sub routine called “InstallGlobalModule”. It’s commented out, but even if you try to activate, it doesn’t work.

Conclusion: This is not a virus, even not a proof of concept.

My conclusion – if we are relying on these ‘anti-virus experts’ to protect the IT industry from viruses, then the sooner everyone moves to open-source software the better. At least then we can judge who the real experts are.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 3rd, 2006 at 3:55 pm and is filed under OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.