Security experts have discovered the first virus that targets Sun Microsystems’ StarOffice application suite. Most macro virus attacks are aimed at Microsoft Office, but antivirus vendor Kaspersky, which discovered the malware, said that ‘Stardust’ is the first that targets StarOffice.
The virus is written in StarOffice’s built-in StarBasic macro language, which is used to script common operations in the office suite. Stardust is thought to be a proof-of-concept rather than a full-scale attack, due to its limited payload. “Stardust is the first virus I know of which is theoretically capable of infecting StarOffice and/or OpenOffice,” a researcher for Kaspersky wrote on the company’s Virus List blog. “It downloads an image file (with adult content) from the internet and then opens this file in a new document.” Macro virus attacks have decreased significantly, but office suites are still targets for malware authors. Microsoft Word was recently attacked by a Trojan that exploited an unpatched vulnerability.
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