Cisco’s Talos security bods predict new wave of Excel Hell It took a few years and one temporary halt, but in July Microsoft finally began blocking certain macros by default in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, cutting off a popular attack vector for those who target users of Microsoft's Windows OS and Office suite. While recent versions of Office block Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) …
Can somebody working in corporate explain why companies still use Microsoft excel?
LibreOffice is a fine substitute and I have no problems performing advanced functions, including macros, without my machine being compromized or vulnerable. The list of CVEs for LibreOffice is low too.
Isn't a win win for corporates just to use LibreOffice, even if just for spreadsheets?
You're looking at the side effect of the entanglement that using Microsoft products brings along to ensure later migration will be too costly.
It's a mix of interdependencies, absence of open standards and any anti-competitive measure they can get away with. Add to that their wining and dining of government officials, law makers and high end people in companies who have no clue but do have budgetary and decision power, some law breaking and IP theft and you have a Hotel California model that has been in play for some four decades now.
That's why it's always better to start a company on open principles, as converting later is possible but your motivation will then not be cost because the untangling prior to conversion will burn a lot of money to. The best arguments for later conversion are massive risk reduction, better resilience and higher productivity. And pragmatically, freedom doesn't count - it's a nice factor, but it's hard to translate to tangible numbers on a spreadsheet.
I can't even imagine how much grief our IT department would get from the non-security-conscious users – which is by far the majority of them – if they tried to replace any of the Office suite with alternatives.
In one of our products, we replaced a couple of inconsistent, awkward, unsafe, generally lousy web administration UIs with a single UI that was developed under good SDLC practices, follows accessibility guidelines like §508 and WCAG, is internally consistent, and offers a lot more functionality. Years ago. Many users insist on re-enabling the legacy UIs and using those instead, despite their many disadvantages. People do not want to change from the tools they're used to, even – or particularly – to be more secure.
> "Details of Project Marketing Plan and Facebook Google Ads Results Report."
OMG, marketing will be all over that bait! Career-enhancing informations not meant for you, just a click away, who cares about some stupid techie warnings!
Obviously it's a little too juicy to be honest if you bother thinking about it (it only lacks a "only for the marketing director's eyes!" part), but then again marketing has never been too bright and greed can move mountains.
Quote: "...cybercriminals from targeting Microsoft..."
...and the words are "cybercriminals".....and you get to guess the other word!!
...clue......it begins with the letter "M".....
...and this has been going on since the Brain virus in 1986.....see link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_(computer_virus)
Yup........thirty six years......and still counting.......
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