Word Macro Virus

trick falltrick fall
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
If a mac recieved a word doc that had a virus could it hibernate on the mac and then pass the virus on to pc's when e-mailing documents? I'm getting some complaints that our I-Mac network is passing off infected docs to the pc's. Is this possible?

Thanks!

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 5
    ebbyebby Posts: 3,110member
    As I understand it, Macro viruses are platform independent. It is a script that the application (MS Word) uses to manipulate files and both the PC and Mac versions of the program can run it. May want to run a virus scan.
  • Reply 2 of 5
    trick falltrick fall Posts: 1,271member
    Thanks Ebby.
  • Reply 3 of 5
    alcimedesalcimedes Posts: 5,486member
    interesting you mention this. came across this just the other day with someone else. weird part is he ran a virus scan on the mac and it found nothing, but then sent a virus on to the PC. 'ill have to look into this and see if this is something that norton just misses now.
  • Reply 4 of 5
    xaqtlyxaqtly Posts: 450member
    Yeah, make sure you have the latest virus defs for your antivirus application. The Mac can act as a host for PC virii - even though the virus won't run on the Mac, if it's contained in an email that gets forwarded it can still infect a PC.
  • Reply 5 of 5
    rodukroduk Posts: 706member
    I believe Word macros are stored within the documents themselves, so when you transfer a document from a PC to a Mac to a PC, you also transfer any macros and any macro viruses within the document. I guess it's just one of the side affects of Word documents being fully interchangeable between Macs and PCs.
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