Virus scanner flagged my own invoice template, turned out to be a real problem | Cybersecurity Tips - Freelance Forum - The Community for Independent Professionals
Virus scanner flagged my own invoice template, turned out to be a real problem
I run a small pest control outfit and keep all my invoices on a shared drive. Last month my antivirus started screaming about one of my old invoice files, so I figured it was a false positive and restored it from backup. Turns out the original file had a macro that got injected after I opened a client's spreadsheet attachment. I spent 6 hours redoing customer records and found out the hard way that trusting a scanner's clean check is not enough. Has anyone else had a similar miss with a trusted security tool, and what do you use to catch stuff it overlooks?
That bit about restoring from backup and it still being bad hits home. I had a customer list get hit the same way a couple years back and the scanner said it was clean too. What finally helped me was turning on macro warnings in Excel and just never clicking enable, even on stuff from people I know. I also started keeping invoices as plain PDFs instead of xls files so there is nothing to run. It is a pain to change how you do things but I have not had a repeat since.