Microsoft blocked the macros last month, but hackers have been turning away from the Office macro attacks as they use new types of files as payloads. The enterprise security firm calls it 'one of the largest email threat landscape shifts in recent history.' The company made the announcement last year, but it took them a long time to implement the changes. 'The use of macro-enabled attachments by threat actors decreased approximately 66% between October 2021 and June 2022,' reads the latest report from Proofpoint.

Hackers have actively used these two macros as threat actors for installing malware on a system via malicious documents downloaded from the internet or phishing mail. Now, XL4 and VBA macros are two small programs used to perform repetitive tasks in Microsoft Office. Macros are a series of commands grouped as one program to perform a task automatically. Hackers are switching to new file types, including ISO, RAR and LNK (Windows Shortcut) attachments, to deliver malware to systems. Now that the company is implementing the changes, attackers have found a new way to bypass Microsoft's move. Last year, Microsoft announced blocking the XL4 (Excel 4.0) and VBA (Visual Basics for Applications) macros by default for the Office suite.

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