Microsoft Loves You to Death
Software gives computer viruses a smooth ride
But again, there‘s a very simple way that Microsoft could prevent this sort of abuse -- their programs could warn you before they run a macro, or perhaps offer a security feature that would prevent running macros altogether. And the software should be shipped with macros disabled. Good news for owners of MS’s latest products: Office 2000 does allow macros to be disabled manually through the ”Tools>Macros>Security“ menu. But according to Patrick Martin, there‘s no way to disable macros on Office 97 or earlier products. (Microsoft did not respond to queries about this problem.)
The bright people who developed the World Wide Web foresaw this problem and deliberately designed HTML, the Web-page programming language, so it couldn’t be used so easily to transmit viruses. But in an attempt to make its application software more powerful than most people need, Microsoft enabled programming code to be put in places where most people wouldn‘t expect it (e.g., in a Word document). And through file-name association, an e-mail attachment is just one click away from executing inside a Microsoft program. All it takes is the human element -- an ”I Love You“ to get you to make that click -- and your computer’s on a one-way ride to hell.
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