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Writing Word Macro Viruses
Full Description
[I used to have a text version of a virus here but I got too many complaints
from people and their system administrators that I was hosting a virus (I
wasn't, I had a page with the listing of a virus on it in plain text) that I
took it down and came up with something else instead.]
Many Microsoft Word users and VBA programmers don't realize the extensive
opportunities that exist for harm when Word's Object Model is accessed using
Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), which replaced WordBasic in conjunction
with the release of Word 97. By creating what is commonly called a "Word Macro
Virus" you can automate many bugs, errors and misfeatures available in Word,
and through Word the rest of Windows. Writing Word Macro Viruses is the
introduction to Word VBA hacking that allows you to do these things and more,
including:
- Create custom pop-up boxes with profanity and swearing
- Automatically create mass emails from users' addressbooks
- Append bits of documents to the end (or beginning) of others at random,
destroying years of work
- Create an invisible toggle switch to change a document from important
draft to blank or useless copy by adding or removing text at any point
- Generate blue screens of death using buffer overflows from other
applications
Not intended to be an encyclopedia of Word macro virus programming, Writing
Word Macro Viruses provides virus writers, as well as sKr1pt k1dd1e5 who are
not familiar with the Word object model but want to cause as much harm and
confusion as quickly as possible with minimum effort with a solid introduction
to writing harmful VBA macros and programs. In particular, the book focuses on:
- The L33t Visual Basic Editor and the Word VBA programming environment.
Word features a terribly complete and very powerful integrated development
environment for writing, running, testing, and debugging VBA macros. Not to
mention hundreds of incomplete checks for destructive payloads
- The VBA programming language (which is the same programming language used
by Microsoft Excel, Access, and PowerPoint, as well as the retail editions of
Visual Basic). So you can make your virus do nasty things to every Office
document on the target's system!
- The Word object model. Word exposes nearly all of its functionality through
its object model (kind of like spreading its legs and closing its eyes at the
dockside of a returning naval ship), which allows Word to be controlled
programmatically using VBA viruses. While the Word object model, with almost
200 objects and easily as many security holes, is the largest among the Office
applications, readers need be familiar with only a handful of objects. Writing
Word Macro Viruses focuses on these essential objects, but includes a
discussion of a great many more badly coded objects as well.
Writing Word Macros is written in a k3wl, easy to understand manner that is
characteristic of a teenager's slapdash and 'learnt from other stuff found on
the web' impractical approach. Instead of a slow-paced tutorial with a lot of
hand-holding, the author offers the essential information about Word VBA that
you need to start annoying people instantly and effectively. This tutorial is
reinforced by interesting and useful examples that give working scripts, like
causing documents to close as soon as you open them, mass mailing your entire
hard drive to you addressbook contents (suitably infected with the same script)
and updating all documents with the word "Mr" with "Asshead".
Writing Word Macro Viruses is the book you need to give you instant and
untutored access to the destructive world of Word VBA virus programming,
enabling you to increase your power and destructive capability when using
Microsoft Word.
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