Security News > 2021 > September > Malicious office documents: The latest trend in cybercriminal exploitation

Malicious office documents: The latest trend in cybercriminal exploitation
2021-09-09 15:23

According to a recent AtlasVPN report, malicious office documents are the latest trend in cybercriminal behavior; a timely strategy as companies pause office reentry plans and continue to work remotely due to COVID-19.

"Even though infecting office documents with malware has been established for a long time, it is still very successful at tricking people," said William Sword, Atlas VPN cybersecurity researcher, in a blog post about the findings.

"After creating a malicious macro on office documents, threat actors send the infected file to thousands of people via email and wait for possible victims. Macro is a series of commands bundled together to accomplish a task automatically."

Overall, the Atlas VPN findings were determined using Netskope Threat Labs' July Cloud and Threat report and "Various office documents from all platforms" including Microsoft Office 365, Google Docs, PDFs and others.

According to AtlasVPN, malicious office documents represented nearly half of all malware downloads in the second quarter of this year, up from 34% in both the first quarter of this year and the fourth quarter of 2020.

In the third quarter of 2020, malicious office documents represented 38% of all downloaded malware, according to Atlas VPN, compared to 14% in the second quarter of 2020 and 20% in the first quarter of last year.


News URL

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/malicious-office-documents-the-latest-trend-in-cybercriminal-exploitation/#ftag=RSS56d97e7