New mining viruses’ target: Microsoft Word

Combined with the disadvantages of Internet Explorer browser, the function of direct copying of the videos in Microsoft Word called Microsoft Word’s Online Video is vulnerable to mining viruses, as specialists on cybersecurity recently reported.

The mining script is injected in the inserted video and uses the victims’ computers to mine for the benefit of the criminals who created it, which is not very dissimilar to the mechanism Bitnewstoday has repeatedly described.

But the representatives of Microsoft denied the idea that their soft is vulnerable:

“This technique relies on social engineering to convince a user to open a malicious document and disable Protected View,” as one of them said to the reporters’ inquiry on the issue.

If true, this means that the most adequate counter-measure for this new threat is open documents only with Protected View, a special mode of Word which disables similar scripts, or not open any suspicious files completely, which can protect not only from mining viruses, but also from Bitcoin ransomware and classic, non-cryptocurrency malicious programs.