Blackmoor Vituperative

Researchers at Kaspersky Lab have spotted what they believe is the first virus for OpenOffice, the open-source rival to Microsoft’s Office productivity suite.

The virus, dubbed Stardust, is capable of infecting OpenOffice and StarOffice, which is sold by Sun Microsystems, a Kaspersky Lab researcher wrote on the Russian company’s Viruslist Web site on Tuesday.

“Stardust is a macro virus written for StarOffice, the first one I’ve seen,” the researcher wrote. “Macro viruses usually infect MS Office applications.”

The pest is written in Star Basic. It downloads an image file with adult content from the Internet and opens that file in a new document, according to Kaspersky’s posting.

(from ZDNet, Stardust virus lands on OpenOffice)

So someone wrote a StarBasic macro that can download an image and display it in a new document.

Excuse me if this is an obvious question, but why, exactly, is this considered a virus? I suppose it could, theoretically, be a trojan, if you created a bunch of OpenOffice documents and gave them misleading names. But hell, you can do that with a text document. “Oh, no, that X-Men 3 script I downloaded is actually Catcher In The Rye! Gasp!”

It’s a macro that downloads an image. It is not a virus. It does not download a virus.

Does the macro execute a virus? Does it do any damage to the system? Install anything? Is it capable of infecting other documents or systems? Until it does at least one of these things, this is a total non-issue.

Not a virus, and not news.

I do like the way the article ends, though:

So far, Stardust is a proof-of-concept virus, which means that it was created to demonstrate that an OpenOffice virus is possible. The virus has not been sent out in the wild and is not actually attacking people’s systems.

The story is different for Microsoft Office applications: A yet-to-be-patched security hole in Word has been exploited in at least one recent cyberattack.

(from ZDNet, Stardust virus lands on OpenOffice)