GENERIC DETECTION AND ELIMINATION OF MACRO VIRUSES

A computer-implemented method, apparatus, and computer readable medium for detecting publicly identified and publicly unidentified macro viruses within code (15) adapted for use on a digital computer (1). A detection module (17) analyzes the code (15) to determine whether the code (15) contains instructions causing a macro (8) to be moved to a global environment (13), and whether said code (15) also contains instructions causing the same macro (8) to be copied to a local document (11). When these two conditions are satisfied, detection module (17) declares that a macro virus is present within the code (8). A repair module (19) can be coupled to the detection module (17) and to the code (15) for deleting the code (15) when the detection module (17) declares that the code (15) contains a macro virus. If the user of the detection module (17) is willing to accept a slight penalty in terms of increased detection time, detection module (17) can be made to handle string concatenation operators, proxied variable names, program calls, and/or substituted object names.