AV and MSFT Office

Until this week, I really had not used any AV other than NAV.
NAV has a useless Office plug-in that can safely be disabled as long as AutoProtect is enabled.

What about other AV software?

I just started trying Kaspersky AV 6 this week. It has an Office Guard option.
If you enable Office Guard it warns you on allegedly dangerous operations, e.g.:

- Making an API call
- Create/Delete directory
- Opening a file for writing
- Disable save of Normal template
- Delete file
- Shell a program
- Creating a e.g., Acess object

I'd sure like to know the target market for Office Guard, other than those who just do not want to run any useful macros.

A typical user is not going to know how to respond to warnings caused by Office Guard. and an experienced user will not want to be bothered by such warnings.

For example, I just ran a macro that does nothing more than gather inputs from the user, write the info to an Access database, and, if requested, emails a copy of a report to someone.

Office Guard complained about Word trying hook up with Access.
That's, at best, ridiculous since Access is already a trusted program.

Indeed, in the real world, I expect that it is very common for a Word macro to hook up with one, or more, of Access, Excel, Outlook and Powerpernt.

What do other AV programs do with (lack of) respect to Office?

 

NOD32 has DMON

 

Based on that description, sounds like DMON is not needed at all, just as NAV's Office plug-in is not needed.

I'll see if there's further info at NOD32's web site.

Thanx.

 

This applies for all AVs . NOD32's AMON scans all files on-access,on-create and on-execute . When you run a doc file , AMON will first scan it because you try to access it just like every other file .

Then when Word is loaded and trying to load the doc , DMON will scan it again

 

ive always found these office plugins as useless....

 

Yes.
At best, they just confuse the inexperienced user by generating tons of false positives to which only an experienced user MIGHT even have a chance of dealing with properly.

I didn't find any details at the NOD32 web site.

 

Examples to demonstrate impact of Office Guard.