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Working of Other Macro Viruses

The current macro viruses no longer limit themselves to WORD or EXCEL. Now there are viruses which infects all the office components alike. "TRISTATE" is one such example which can infect WORD, EXCEL and POWERPOINT files.

MS OFFICE allows insertion of Spreadsheet within a document, document within a spreadsheet and so on. It even support multiple level of object insertion. This leads to a situation like a document within a spreadsheet within a document. The viruses can also travel at that level and come into picture when embedded object is selected. This makes the detection of such viruses very difficult. In case of office viruses like Tristate, they become all the more dangerous as the embedded object may perpetually infects it's host also.

New breed Macro viruses are expected with the arrival of OFFICE 2000, which is based on COM objects. These objects can be registered thro' registry. They can be self configured to get executed under certain conditions. Optionally they can be reflected in menu/toolbar etc.