Downloading or receiving emails from unknown sources is a risk that we all know can have dire consequences, but that seemingly innocent Word document is now more of a security risk than ever before.
It was recently discovered that hackers are starting to take advantage of a unique security flaw to gain access to your computer. Previously they would do this by sending you Word documents that contain what are known as “macros.” When enabled, malicious macros can download viruses directly to your machine. Since Microsoft began issuing security warnings for macros, hackers have now found ways to abuse DDE, or Dynamic Data Exchange. DDE is a process that Microsoft uses to share data between applications. For example, Mail Merge can take data from an Excel document and insert it into a Word document. However, it also turns out that hackers can use DDE to send silent download commands in the background of your computer.