antivirus and marco virus

Right, I have a couple of questions that is gonna make myself sound very silly.

I have recently reformatted my Mac and am debating whether of not to install a new antivirus, my old one was Norton and wasn't very good. A couple of friends said don't bother with the antivirus because it will slow down the machine, and Macs very rare get any which I have always known, but I transfer stuff from multiple machines and download attachments and other stuff on a daily basis, so any suggestion at all?

We have marco virus at work and I have been creating a lot of word docs at my mac at work before I discovered that, I am a little scared to open them on my own Mac at home, because I don't want to get infected. If I was to save them word docs as PDFs (I don't need to amend them anymore, just for records), would they then be safe to open on my Mac? How exactly does marco virus infect others? And what other programs could the marco virus be hidden?

Really sorry for these silly questions and thank you.

E

Well, I'm pretty sure that the Marco virus will not run on Mac anyway, but if you want a good Mac Anti Virus program, get Clamxav at www.clamxav.com

You coud always google Marco virus to see how it behaves on other computers.

If you save the Word documents as PDFs you are safe.

I'm not sure that the Macro Viruses for MS Office for Windows will work on the newer Mac versions, although they use to (didn't MS remove the macros from Mac Office 2008?). The Macro Viruses only impact MS Office documents to the best of my knowledge and won't hurt your system or other non MS Office files.

Thanks, I was looking through my files, and I found a few that I do need access to in the future, possibly... one of which being my love and hate dissertation, so have you got any idea how I can make a safe copy of those files in words? Or according to what you say, does that mean even if I had a marco virus, I can just ignore it? And my computer would only get infected if I actually open an infected file, having it on the hardrive won't do anything, right?

Sorry I know I sound very stupid, I am not actually new to Mac at all, but have spent the past few years focusing on something else, now I really do need to learn all these basics...

Well, any PC virus you do download just won't run on a Mac. I seem to have some class of virus that is in my MS Word documents - does absolutely nothing to my machine, doesn't change the docs or anything else. The problem is that I occasionally pass it on to other people with emails etc.

If you want a truly safe copy then save them to a flash drive or something and keep it somewhere safe...

I use AVG. It works fine on my Mac.

skaheadpunk said:

Well, any PC virus you do download just won't run on a Mac. I seem to have some class of virus that is in my MS Word documents - does absolutely nothing to my machine, doesn't change the docs or anything else. The problem is that I occasionally pass it on to other people with emails etc.

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The macro viruses were OS independent and would infect any version of MS Office for some years. They weren't a big deal, unless they trashed the Word or Excel document you needed, then they sucked.

baggss said:

The macro viruses were OS independent and would infect any version of MS Office for some years. They weren't a big deal, unless they trashed the Word or Excel document you needed, then they sucked.

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no VBA in 08.

Thanks all, all saved as PDFs or deleted.

Another slightly silly question, if a drive a virus infected, if I format that drive, then does that mean it will be clean?

Yup, should do.

Dysfunction said:

no VBA in 08.

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Ya, I didn't thinks so. With that, the Macros are pretty much useless.

this is the thread i needed... shame there's not answer though
we've got some word files at work with virus infected macros (we have a pc server and mac workstations> power pc running tiger 10.4.11 )
we've used clamxav to scan but it seems to be just a checker; it does not clean anything...
is there a free (credit-crunch is killing us) anti-virus program out there that will identify AND clean infected files? (not just quarantine and/or delete)
your help will be much appreciated...

titina said:

we've used clamxav to scan but it seems to be just a checker; it does not clean anything...
is there a free (credit-crunch is killing us) anti-virus program out there that will identify AND clean infected files? (not just quarantine and/or delete)
your help will be much appreciated...

Click to expand...

Because there is nothing to clean. The file isn't harmful for the Mac OS and cannot even be read or handled by the Mac OS. It quarantines it because it doesn't know what else to do with it.
If you need to clean it out or delete it, then you will have to do so on a Windows machine.

Word Macro viruses haven't affected a Macintosh system since Word version 5... some 17 years and over half a dozen OS versions ago.

What to do if your computer with an Office for Mac program installed has a macro virus

Word 5 and Excel 4 macros will still work in Office 2008 (unlike VBA macros) for what it's worth. VBA macros work in Office 2004 and will be supported in the next version (2010? 2012?) as well.

The new Office 2008 formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) don't support macros at all (there are different macro-enabled versions -- .docm, .xlsm, and .pptm -- that do) so one option would be to open all the infected documents and save them into the new, non-macro-enabled versions.

you should be safe on a mac with a pc macro virus, but converting them to pdf's would disenfect the files for other computers. Macs can be like typhoid mary. You can have files with viruses on your computer, but they won;t effect you. If you email them to a pc user, though, they'll have a problem.

D3v1L80Y said:

Because there is nothing to clean. The file isn't harmful for the Mac OS and cannot even be read or handled by the Mac OS. It quarantines it because it doesn't know what else to do with it.
If you need to clean it out or delete it, then you will have to do so on a Windows machine.

Word Macro viruses haven't affected a Macintosh system since Word version 5... some 17 years and over half a dozen OS versions ago.

Click to expand...

it might not affect the running of the os on the macs but it does affect the word templates that we use in that they stop working. note that we have a windows (pah! spit!) running server. I'm not gonna explain all the details; it's irrelevant, suffice to say, this macro needed to be eradicated from both macs and server. cleaning just the server was not enough as it kept getting re-infected.

as a note to anyone who finds this thread with a similar problem: we used sophos trial version to clean our macs (the server is running norton and was also cleaned)