Stardust – a macro curiosity

I came across something interesting today: a macro virus which we’ve named Virus.StarOffice.Stardust.a

You might wonder what’s interesting about this – viruses have been around for a long time, and are starting to fade from the scene.

But if you look more closely at the name, you can see why I’m interested: Stardust is a macro virus written for StarOffice, the first one I’ve seen. Macro viruses usually infect MS Office applications.

Stardust is the first virus I know of which is theoretically capable of infecting StarOffice and/ or OpenOffice. It’s written in Star Basic. It downloads an image file (with adult content) from the Internet and then opens this file in a new document.

We’ll have a description of it in the Virus Encyclopaedia soon.