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General discussion

MS Word and a Virus on my Mac

Jan 19, 2010 12:31PM PST

I'm finding that when I send Word Documents as attachments to my e-mails they are either bouncing back with a virus warning, or simply not being accepted because the virus protection on the recipients computer is blocking them.

Seems to only be clinging to MS Office documents. PDF files go through just fine.

I'm not sure what's on my computer, because I have no details on the virus, but as a Mac user, it's been a long time since I've done any research on virus protection for my machine.

Can anyone recommend a good anti-virus application for the Mac?
I'm still using MS Office 2004, would updating to Office 2008 make any difference? (or fix the problem?)

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thank you.

Discussion is locked

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Re: virus
Jan 19, 2010 4:51PM PST

Upload the file to www.virustotal.com and see what it says about it. If it's clean, there is no reason to worry.

Kees

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Re: virus problems with MS Word Doc.
Jan 21, 2010 1:23PM PST

Virustotal.com seemed to find something.

A small sample of the results:

---------------

a-squared_____4.5.0.50_____2010.01.22___Virus.MSWord.Ded.A!IK
AhnLab-V3_____5.0.0.2______2010.01.22___-
AntiVir_______7.9.1.146____2010.01.21___W97M/Ded.A
Antiy-AVL_____2.0.3.7______2010.01.21___-
Authentium____5.2.0.5______2010.01.22___W97M/Ded.A
Avast_________4.8.1351.0___2010.01.22___MW97:Ded family
AVG___________9.0.0.730____2010.01.21___W97M/Ded
BitDefender___7.2__________2010.01.22___W97M.Ded.K
CAT-QuickHeal_10.00________2010.01.22___W97M.Ded
ClamAV________0.94.1_______2010.01.22___W97M.Ded.F
Comodo________3664_________2010.01.22___-
DrWeb_________5.0.1.12222__2010.01.22___modification of W97M.Thus
eSafe_________7.0.17.0_____2010.01.21___O97M.GNcc
eTrust-Vet____35.2.7251____2010.01.21___Ded.A

etc.

Additional information
File size: 641536 bytes
MD5...: 4423437f7ce1e0e82136eab96dfb5eec
SHA1..: c05265b92e54b2a3276e61d3869f9061cf71967b
SHA256: 11d6da9c919637abc8ff80013c64221c1dd38767a1e3416378374da5eec60ed9
ssdeep: 12288:/d2h4v3Y7aZFhFJbCGjMi6+9D0IFjoJgA2OOraXNuYMXJVTiPeAFiFyrfY
rUG:cWB/rjMi1QejKdjMziPe7FCG
PEiD..: -
PEInfo: -
RDS...: NSRL Reference Data Set

etc.

trid..: Microsoft Word document (80.0%)
Generic OLE2 / Multistream Compound File (20.0%)

---------------
The odd thing is that I made a new document - a single line of text, and tried it again, and the results were negative. No problems found.

Could a single document have a virus and if deleted and simply recreated, perhaps, solve the problem?

Again, any suggestions would be appreciated. If I need to get anti-virus software, I'll do it, but would like to get some thoughts on why one document would be infected and not another.