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[ Go to July 1997 Table of Contents ]
News
Technical associate David Hafke recently discovered a new Word-macro virus that gets around Microsoft's ScanProt. It prevents you from saving a document as anything except a DOT (document template) file. Symptoms: the Save As Type field in the Save As box will be grayed out and read Document Template (*.DOT), the Macro box will fail to appear when you try to bring it up, and Word will ask you to save changes to NORMAL.DOT-even if you didn't make any. As long as you don't save the changes to NORMAL.DOT, you can retrieve data from an infected file without harm. Open Word twice, then open the infected document in the second instance. Cut and paste the infected document into the blank document. Close the original infected document without saving anything. Word will report that NORMAL.DOT is in use and cannot be saved. When the Save As dialog box appears, click on Cancel and Word will close. Overwrite the original with the pasted copy. To date, Norton AntiVirus can neither detect nor clean this strain.
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