In case you thought making a Word or Excel virus attack was hard, think again. The ‘Rubella Macro Builder’ will sell you a DIY kit with updates for just US$40 a month.
The virus maker will take you through the steps to make a hacked Word or Excel document that can infect a computer and network with the nasty software (malware) of your choice. The malware can copy login details, steal documents or databases or much worse.
Rubella kits have already been used to infect computers with banking malware called Panda or Gootkit.
Rubella Macro Builder isn’t especially sophisticated. It doesn’t exploit any unpatched or recent security holes in Office.
Instead it tries to trick people into running the macros after opening the document, in other words, click the Enable Content button.
.DOC and .XLS
The good news is that Rubella, like most other Office viruses, only work with the older Office documents.
They make Word .DOC and Excel .XLS files which should be avoided anyway.
Virus Subscription
The Russian makers of Rubella have cheekily taken a page from Microsoft’s marketing strategy. They charge a ‘subscription’ of US$120 for three months, a mere forty bucks a month.
More info
Flashpoint has a detailed explanation of what Rubella Virus Maker does.
