While many loud malware attacks were related to exploited vulnerabilities, humans remain the weakest link of the defense chain. Social engineering techniques can allow malicious actors to successfully execute their code without creating or buying complicated exploits. Since many organizations now provide cybersecurity training for all newcomers, many people know basic things, such as it is unsafe to click on links or executable files received by various means from outside of the organization or the group of people that you know. Therefore, the attackers have to invent new ways to trick users, and documents containing malicious macros are a great example of these ongoing efforts.

MS Office macros incorporate the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming language. This is derived from Visual Basic 6, which was discontinued a long time ago. The VBA survived and was later upgraded to version 7. Normally, the code can only run within a host application...