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Help Removing a Macro Virus

asuandy

asuandy

macrumors regular
Original poster
My sisters iBook is infected with the W97M.Story macro virus. CLAMXAV (free virus scanner) doesnt detect it, but Yahoo email scanned an attachment and found it. Any advice would be awesome. thanks
 
Her Mac is not infected. Though the file is infected. You will need to delete the file. Yahoo scans files indiscriminately of the OS that it will be used on. This would affect a PC, but not the iBook or OS X.
 
All you really need to do is delete the e-mail and delete the attachment if it was downloaded to the computer.
 
It infects every new document she makes. One she saves it and trys to email it, Yahoo scans it and picks it up
 
You should definitely have her turn on that feature that prompts you when a document has macros. If she doesn't know what a macro is, the chances are that she and her friends aren't using them, right? So she can basically always just click "no."

I'm really surprised these are still floating in the wild. I haven't seen one since about 1997. Unamusingly that particular macro virus (this was also pretty much the first time I heard of the phenomenon) put messages in the footer against nuclear testing... on the footer of my nuclear physics lab reports. 🙄 🙁
 
Get rid of m$ soft and install NeoOffice instead.
Most people do not need all the "features" of m$ Orifice.

M$ soft in a Mac... unbelievable, I did switch to Mac to not have to use M$ crap... :apple:
 
asuandy said:
It infects every new document she makes. One she saves it and trys to email it, Yahoo scans it and picks it up
Click to expand...

Yes, most of the macro viruses attach themselves to the Normal template, so that any new document will contain the viruses.

For some reason, the MS Office virus protection doesn't really work, though one macro virus I've seen on Windows decided to turn off the protection.
 
ale500 said:
Get rid of m$ soft and install NeoOffice instead.
Most people do not need all the "features" of m$ Orifice.

M$ soft in a Mac... unbelievable, I did switch to Mac to not have to use M$ crap... :apple:
Click to expand...

I have to use office for the reviewer ability. Comments are essential for my work (Ph.D student). However, I am very much looking forward to the new version! I am getting tired of Rosetta
 
I am also a Ph.D student, chemistry. My own Supervisor advised me to get a Mac. 🙂, He still uses Orifice 98 or so, under Classic. It is so crappy, every time he has to use Word, it hangs. It does not render eps properly, It does not accept newly created docs (from word 2003 win), without its quirks, besides you are saving them in doc. Unbelievable.

The other day a colleague and I had to do some paper in her winblows (under)powered pc with word. Took more time to fight the hangs, the rendering problems, the positioning bugs, that are still not fixed from '97 !, than the actual work.
I said next time, I'll do it completely with some other application. This m$ crap is too much a hassle for what is worth. NeoOffice and OpenOffice never gave me so many headaches.

I have the choice, I started to learn TeX. And I am planning to write my Thesis with it.
 
mkrishnan said:
I'm really surprised these are still floating in the wild. I haven't seen one since about 1997. Unamusingly that particular macro virus (this was also pretty much the first time I heard of the phenomenon) put messages in the footer against nuclear testing... on the footer of my nuclear physics lab reports. 🙄 🙁
Click to expand...

That's absolutely hilarious! 😀
 
Santa Rosa said:
So ironic its untrue!!! Did the person marking it see it?
Click to expand...

LOL, no, at this time, Macro viruses were not that well known. I was working at a campus lab and I took it up to the desk and said (in essence), "WTF is this????" They had a chuckle and then helped me fix it. 🙂

I don't know... the professor in question was a very German German who had done nuclear work over there and fled in the 30s. I can't recall him laughing a lot. 😛
 
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