Microsoft rolls back plan to block VBA macros by default

 

It's been five months since Microsoft announced plans to disable Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macros by default in the Office productivity suite, and it now appears that the company has reversed its decision.

Angela Robertson, a Microsoft employee, stated in a comment that was posted on July 6 that "a rollback has started based on the feedback received." "An update regarding the rollback is currently being prepared. I am sorry if the rollback operation started causing any inconvenience to you before the most recent information about the change was made available."

The multinational technology corporation announced in February 2022 that it would disable macros by default across all of its products, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, and Visio, for documents that were downloaded from the internet. This was done in an effort to prevent potential attacks that exploit the functionality in order to install malware.

According to a statement made by Microsoft at the time, "bad actors send macros in Office files to end-users who unknowingly enable them, malicious payloads are delivered, and the impact can be severe," including malware, compromised identity, data loss, and remote access. "Bad actors send macros in Office files to end-users who unknowingly enable them."

It is currently unclear what the "feedback" was or what prompted Redmond to change its strategy without providing any official notice. We have reached out to Microsoft for additional comments, and if we receive a response, we will update this story accordingly.