One of the arguments pushed forward by the proponents of OpenOffice, the free open source desktop suite (replacement for Ms-Office) has long been the total lack of security issues. I never did use it, while I favor strongly OpenOffice and I appreciate this feature, because I felt that it was only linked to the more limited visibility of the product (the most visible, Ms-Office, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, attract all the attention of virus writers).
But today, Kaspersky Lab announced the discovery of the very first macro virus, StarDust.a, targetting OpenOffice and this may be starting the run for security. As we saw with Apple, while catching more attention, the Apple products have been more and more at the receiving end of the attempts from virus writers. It appears that OpenOffice is going the same way. We’ll see if it is inherently safer or not. At the moment, it is still much less attacked.
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