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24 Jan 2000

New Visio macro viruses - not a threat

Sophos has announced the discovery of the first macro viruses which target Visio drawings.

VM5/Radiant-A (also known as VIS5/RadiantAngels) and VM5/Unstable-A (also known as V2KM/Unstable, Visio2000.Unstable and Visio2K.Unstable) are being analysed by Sophos virus researchers in the Sophos virus labs. Neither have been reported from the wild and they are not considered a significant threat.

Detection for these viruses will be included in a future version of Sophos Anti-Virus.

Visio Corp, which develops business drawing and diagramming software, was acquired by Microsoft in January 2000. The Visio product incorporates the Visual Basic for Applications macro language also found in Microsoft's Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and Project products.

About Sophos

Sophos is one of the world's largest specialist developers of anti-virus and encryption software. The products are sold and supported through a global network of subsidiaries and distributors in more than 40 countries. Sophos Anti-Virus is widely used by large corporations, banks and governments.

The product set is notable for its reliability, stability, consistently high detection rates and fine engineering. The update infrastructure and technical support are outstanding. Sophos Plc was recently voted Britain's best medium-sized company.

About Sophos

More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, and network access control solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers. With more than two decades of experience, Sophos is regarded as a leader in security and data protection by top analyst firms and has received many industry awards.

Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.