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StarOffice Sees Its First Virus
David Utter
Staff Writer
2006-05-31
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
Researchers at antivirus firm Kaspersky have found a proof-of-concept virus for the StarOffice productivity suite floating in the wild.
 | | StarOffice Virus Discovered |  |
For those readers who have spent their professional lives on Microsoft Office, a brief introduction to StarOffice is in order. Sun Microsystems distributes StarOffice, at a dramatically lower price than Microsoft's signature product. StarOffice users can do word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and other tasks with the suite.
An open source version of the product, called OpenOffice, may be obtained freely from its website. The two products offer alternatives to Microsoft's dominant software; the article you're reading right now was written with OpenOffice.
Besides the cost factor, another pleasure of working with a Microsoft alternative has been the relative freedom from security issues that the MS Office crowd has to worry about regularly. That has changed now, as a proof of concept virus for StarOffice reported by InfoWorld has been witnessed by Kaspersky Labs.
The virus, dubbed Virus.StarOffice.Stardust.a or simply Stardust, is "theoretically capable of infecting StarOffice and/or OpenOffice," according to Kaspersky. Stardust is a macro virus written in StarBasic. When executed, it downloads an adult image and opens it in a new document.
InfoWorld said a site on Lycos' Tripod service hosts the file being downloaded by the macro. Roel Schouwenberg, senior research engineer for Kaspersky, noted in the report that "If a user opens a document infected with Stardust, every StarOffice text document, with a ".sxw" extension, or document template, with a ".stw" extension, will be infected."
Schouwenberg also said in the report that with a little tweaking, the proof of concept could be adapted to affecting OpenOffice users. "We're not hyping it. The world is not coming to an end. It's just a poc (proof-of-concept)."
That may be the case. But for those of us who use applications like OpenOffice regularly and have enjoyed a virus-free existence, it's still a little disturbing.
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Tags: StarOffice, OpenOffice, Kaspersky
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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