A Brief History of Cybercrime and Cyberwarfare - The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering - page 404

Various websites provide instructions for detecting and removing hardware and
software keyboard trackers.
Considering the number of free and open-source keyboard trackers available,
one might assume many legitimate uses. However, it is hard to envision a legitim-
ate justification for tracking keystrokes other than as part of a criminal investiga-
tion or to protect highly secret information.
Without any statistical studies that report keystroke-tracking usage, the most
common uses would seem to be something unethical and possibly illegal, such as
seeking passwords, social security numbers, and other kinds of personal informa-
tion from unsuspecting computer users.
Note
The term “malware” is a concatenation based on “malicious” in the
sense of something harmful and the last half of “software.” When
combined, the term malware is a generic term that includes viruses,
rootkits, worms, Trojans, spam, and other harmful software topics.
Macro Attacks in Word and Excel Documents
Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel are two of the most widely used software
applications in the world. Both of these have some advanced features that utilize
macro instruction.
In the context of Word and Excel, macro instructions are small sequences of
code created in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) that can be used to simplify
repetitive tasks or deal with ranges of information. There is a built-in macro re-
corder for storing these, and the macros go along with Word and Excel documents
when they are emailed as attached files.
Unfortunately, hackers can use the Excel and Word macro recording feature to
create harmful macros that can spread from computer to computer. Once inside a
computer, the dangerous macro can replicate itself and also attack the computer
files.