How to Avoid Macro Viruses

Windows user, especially Ms-Word, must be already familiar with “Macro Virus”. Yes it’s suck when your *.doc document get infected with this virus. This virus could change your original text with something else, change the extension into *.exe, or even you could lost your document. This virus is often spread in public computer service, yeah you could find any other viruses at this place, I say it’s the “kingdom” of viruses :p.

But why, MS-Word document can infected by macro virus? It’s happen because the “macro” feature in MS-Word. Actually this feature is usefull for them who often do repetitve task on MS-Word, because macro can do it automatically for you. But, because this feature is using VB Script, this feature can be used to run malicious scripts (the virus).

So how could we avoid this virus? Change your word processor application? No ..no, we could still this our favorite word processor. Remember, Ms-Word still support other document format, it’s *.RTF (Rich Text Format). This kind format does not support macro, so it’s impossible to the viruses to infect and broke our document. But how abot the layout? Don’t worry the RTF layout will be the same as DOC. As long as you never use the macro feature for your document, your document will be safe until printing process. So from now, get use to save your document into RTF, at least make one backup for your document in RTF, just for in case!.