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I opened malicious MS Office xlsb file with OpenOffice by huge mistake. I am wondering does it possess any risk? From what I am aware Excel macros are not compatible with OpenOffice. So I should be fine?

user1324762
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I will post a 2 steps answer here.

  1. will macros targetting MsOffice VBA be executed by OpenOffice?

    AFAIK no. Even if OpenOffice macros can use VBA syntax, they cannot use the Microsoft VBA objects to interact with the file or the system. So whatever the macro was intented to do in Excel, it was not able to do the same thing through OpenOffice

  2. can malicious MsOffice files harm OpenOffice?

    AFAIK yes, provided they specifically target OpenOffice. OpenOffice is a very large code and because of that has a very large attack surface. While I have no evidence for it, I would bet a coin that the code able to read Excel files can contain some exploitable flaws...

Serge Ballesta
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  • I just found out that there is security settings in OpenOffice with default settings say "Only signed macros from trusted sources are allowed to run. Unsigned macros are disabled". I guess this should remove all my concerns now. – user1324762 Mar 16 '22 at 10:26