More Word Macro Viruses -- According to a recent CIAC bulletin, new Microsoft Word macro viruses have been discovered, and at least two of the new varieties are damaging. (See TidBITS-312 for a related story.)

http://ciac.llnl.gov/ciac/bulletins/g-10a.shtml

Although the worst effects are still reserved for Windows users (apparently the virus engineers aren't up-to-date on cross-platform concerns), users of Microsoft Word 6.0 or 6.0.1 on the Macintosh should be concerned. Microsoft has released new tools to combat these viruses, and many commercial anti-virus products are being updated to detect them as well.

http://www.microsoft.com/msoffice/freestuf/ msword/download/mvtool/mvtool2.htm

I haven't examined or tested Microsoft's new virus protection tools, and though Microsoft claims these tools work on a Macintosh, they're posted in a self-extracting ZIP format for DOS/Windows machines. StuffIt Expander with Expander Enhancer will decompress the file; so will Thomas Brown's popular Mac shareware utility ZipIt. As with Microsoft's earlier anti-virus tool, Microsoft's new utility only scans files opened by choosing Open from the File menu; documents which are double-clicked in the Finder or chosen from the recent documents list are not scanned. [GD]

Microsoft -- 206/635-7200 -- <wordinfo@microsoft.com>

ftp://mirror.aol.com/pub/info-mac/cmp/stuffit- expander-352.bin
ftp://mirror.aol.com/pub/info-mac/cmp/drop- stuff-with-ee-352.hqx
ftp://mirror.aol.com/pub/info-mac/cmp/zip-it- 135.hqx