Microsoft Office may be by far the most widely used suite for processing documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Due to its popularity, it is continuously utilised to carry out malicious campaigns. Threat actors, exploiting the platform's dynamic features, use it to launch their attacks and penetrate millions of hosts in their campaigns. This work explores the modern landscape of malicious Microsoft Office documents, exposing the means that malware authors use. We leverage a taxonomy of the tools used to weaponise Microsoft Office documents and explore the modus operandi of malicious actors. Moreover, we generated and publicly shared a specially crafted dataset, which relies on incorporating benign and malicious documents containing many dynamic features such as VBA macros and DDE. The latter is crucial for a fair and realistic analysis, an open issue in the current state of the art. This allows us to draw safe conclusions on the malicious features and behaviour. More precisely, we extract the necessary features with an automated analysis pipeline to efficiently and accurately classify a document as benign or malicious using machine learning with an F₁ score above 0.98, outperforming the current state of the art detection algorithms.

Due to its critical role in cybersecurity, digital forensics has received significant attention from researchers and practitioners alike. The ever increasing sophistication of modern cyberattacks is directly related to the complexity of evidence acquisition, which often requires the use of several technologies. To date, researchers have presented many surveys and reviews on the field. However, such articles focused on the advances of each particular domain of digital forensics individually. Therefore, while each of these surveys facilitates researchers and practitioners to keep up with the latest advances in a particular domain of digital forensics, the global perspective is missing. Aiming to fill this gap, we performed a qualitative review of all the relevant reviews in the field of digital forensics, determined the main topics on digital forensics topics and identified their main challenges. Despite the diversity of topics and methods, there are several common problems that are faced by almost all of them, with most of them residing in evidence acquisition and pre-processing due to counter analysis methods and difficulties of collecting data from devices, the cloud etc. Beyond pure technical issues, our study highlights procedural issues in terms of readiness, reporting and presentation, as well as ethics, highlighting the European perspective which is traditionally stricter in terms of privacy. Our extensive analysis paves the way for closer collaboration among researcher and practitioners among different topics of digital forensics.