Microsoft is now disabling Excel 4.0 macros by default

Back in October 2021, Microsoft announced in an email sent to customers that it planned to disable Excel 4.0 macros by default to protect customers from malicious documents.

Now, Microsoft says that change has happened.

Good news

Sometimes good news in the security world comes later than expected. After three decades of macro viruses, and three decades of trying to convince every single Excel user individually to disable macros, Microsoft is making it the default.

Excel 4.0 macros, aka XLM macros, were first added to Excel in 1992. They allowed users to add commands into spreadsheet cells that were then executed to perform a task. Unfortunately, we soon learned that (like any code) macros could be made to perform malicious tasks. Office documents have been a favorite hiding place of malicious code ever since.

In July 2021, Microsoft released a new Excel Trust Center setting option to restrict the usage of Excel 4.0 (XLM) macros. As planned, this setting is now the default when opening Excel 4.0 (XLM) macros.

Administrators also have the option to completely block all XLM macro usage (including in new user-created files) by enabling the Group Policy, “Prevent Excel from running XLM macros”, which is configurable via Group Policy Editor or registry key.

Backward compatibility

For backward compatibility reasons the feature was never removed, despite being superseded by Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) just one year after XLM macros were introduced.

I understand the argument in favor of keeping it back then, but why keep it enabled by default for so long after, when so few people use it? Microsoft could have made it so that those that needed Excel 4.0 macros had to turn the feature on, and the rest of us (the overwhelming majority of Excel users) could have been more secure without having to remember to turn it off.

Will you miss it?

It is very, very unlikely you will miss Excel 4.0 macros. XLM was the default macro language for Excel through Excel 4.0, but beginning with version 5.0, Excel recorded macros in VBA by default, although XLM recording was still allowed as an option. After version 5.0 that option was discontinued. All versions of Excel are capable of running XLM macros, though Microsoft discourages their use.

Now—almost 30 years after they were made obsolete—it’s fair to stay that the biggest users of Excel 4.0 macros are probably cybercriminals.

Abuse cases

Attackers have always liked Office macros because they provide a simple and reliable method to spread malware using legitimate features, without relying on any vulnerability or exploit. XLM macros have been used to drop many well-known malware families, including ZLoader, TrickBot, BitRat, QBot, Dridex, FormBook and StrRat, among others.

But this does not mean that now all documents are safe to open now. Malware authors are moving on to use other vulnerabilities like CVE-2017-11882.

Security over backward compatibility

Despite the shared joy about this security enhancing rollout, it raises the question of when does security overrule backward compatibility? Microsoft must have better things to do than fix obsolete features from the past century. Wouldn’t it have been preferable if the step up to VBA in 1993 had been less steep, so we could all forget about 4.0 and move on to the latest version without having to look over our shoulder? Or perhaps Microsoft could have disabled this potentially dangerous feature decades ago and left it to those who actually wanted it to turn it back on?

If history has taught us anything, it’s that the incentive to enable something you need is a lot stronger than the incentive to disable something that might be potentially dangerous.

Stay safe, everyone!

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