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Microsoft to kill off VBScript in Windows to block malware delivery
(www.bleepingcomputer.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2023
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Man I hate VBA as much as the next guy, but when the IT department has your network so locked down you cant install anything. Having that hidden tab in Excel to write a script to automate some mundane task was really useful. I like python, but there's no fuckin way my ex employer would just allow me to run random python code like they did for VBA. It was a gov job btw.
Python is soon to be integrated into excel, I might not be a python fan but if it's gonna replace vba I'm all for it.
It'll only run on cloud. Their employer would probably block that too.
Afaik the python is ran on Microsoft servers, so not exactly a perfect solution. I doubt it will run offline at all
Wouldn't it face the exact same security issues as VBA, with drive-by installs of obfuscated malware and executions of arbitrary code?
Can you not say that too loudly please
You don't understand. "Security" is always the goto reason for either changing or leaving stuff as is, if companies don't want to state the real reason.
People are used to ccept "Security" as a reason for almost anything.
I remember once where a MS guy (someone higher up, don't remeber who, is many years ago...) was asked why the Windows filesystems are case-insensitive and stated the reason was security, so that one file cannot be named the same with just different upper/lowercasing letters. Classic deflection.
The article is not about VBA, it's about VBS. The languages are similar but not the same (why exactly MS did it this way I'll never know).
VBA is for embedded macros in MS Office documents.
VBS is a standalone language you write into .vbs files that get executed by wscript.exe. It's a default windows feature that has been around a long time (IIRC the ILOVEYOU worm used it).
Not to mention Python’s in cloud