newby question - Mac with office 2008

[bobb53]

Are macs running office 2008 at risk for getting viruses?

Only from opening infected office files or can the machine be attached by the web as well?

IF I am using strictly Safari to access the web, will the windows side remain safe from viruses....for now?

sorry if this doesnt make much sense....again, totally new here.

 

[tjevans]

As of this date, there are no viruses for OS 10 in the wild. It is possible for there to be a macro virus in a Office document, but, my understanding is that it will not affect your mac, but could affect any windows pc with which you share that file.

As far as your last question, if I understand it right, you are asking if windows (I presume in either a virtualization environment or running bootcamp) can get infected from any viruses you may come across while using safari. As far as I know, no.

Someone with more knowledge on virii may correct my answers, though.

 

[robbieduncan]

Amusingly the removal of VBA from Office:Mac 2008 makes this very unlikely. All existing Office document based viruses (which are rarely written these days) are VBA based. As Office:Mac 2008 cannot execute VBA this is a non-issue

 

[Makosuke]

IF I am using strictly Safari to access the web, will the windows side remain safe from viruses....for now?

I assume you mean "Safari under MacOS," in which case mostly. If you run Safari under Windows (there is a version!) then you have the standard risks--it's probably not as full of holes as IE6, but not without risk.

The "mostly" is because if you were to download a virus-infected file, then for whatever reason open it in a Windows virtual machine (or while booted in Windows via Boot Camp), then you could still infect your Windows install.

Also, the standard direct-access holes stand; there have been, in the past, security holes in Windows that can cause it to become infected without any user interaction at all--just exposure to an outside network (I've seen this happen). They're all currently patched, and if you have a router (or are running a Windows virtual machine with some settings) you're probably ok anyway, but you can't say 100%.

Same is of course true of OSX, although I'm not aware of any holes as severe as the pre-XP-SP2 ones were to date.

 

[Gibson88]

As of this date, there are no viruses for OS 10 in the wild. It is possible for there to be a macro virus in a Office document, but, my understanding is that it will not affect your mac, but could affect any windows pc with which you share that file.

As far as your last question, if I understand it right, you are asking if windows (I presume in either a virtualization environment or running bootcamp) can get infected from any viruses you may come across while using safari. As far as I know, no.

Someone with more knowledge on virii may correct my answers, though.

Pretty much summed up what i was gonna say.