In February 2022, the tech giant said it was disabling macros by default across its products, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and Visio, for documents downloaded from the web in an attempt to mitigate potential attacks that abuse the functionality for deploying malware.
Five months after announcing plans to disable Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros by default in the Office productivity suite, Microsoft appears to have rolled back its plans.
Why did Microsoft disable macros in the first place?
It is a challenging time in software security; migration to the modern cloud, the largest number of remote workers ever, and a global pandemic impacting staffing and supply chains all contribute to changes in organizations. Unfortunately, these changes also give bad actors opportunities to exploit organizations, stated Microsoft.
“For the protection of our customers, we need to make it more difficult to enable macros in files obtained from the internet.”
Why the rollback?
“Following user feedback, we have rolled back this change temporarily while we make some additional changes to enhance usability,” a Microsoft spokesperson said. “This is a temporary change, and we are fully committed to making the default change for all users. Regardless of the default setting, customers can block internet macros through the Group Policy settings described in this article.”
Bottomline
The stance of blocking the macros by default lead to complaints by users. Hence, Microsoft has decided to “Temporarily” roll back the decision of disabling macros on Office applications by default.
This means that in near future, this feature of disabled macros by default would be back in play.
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