Security Risks in Microsoft Excel Spreadsheets

It is a scary thought, but your Microsoft Excel spreadsheets are vulnerable. Just as hackers on the Internet can easily hack your email address, so can someone make changes in your Microsoft Excel spreadsheets if there are not enough security controls in place.

We will look at some of the vulnerabilities regarding security with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. There are quite a few ways to bypass security controls in the program. As such you may need to audit your worksheets from time to time to check for changes made.

The general security measures that can be applied are:

• Password required for opening workbooks
• Password required to make changes to the workbook structure
• Password required for changing the content in a sheet or cell

The password encrypts the specific workbook, the structure or the cells in a sheet. Unfortunately commercial hackers can make use of various programs available on the Internet to obtain the password for a file.

A few steps to ensure that your password stays safe:

• Don’t share it with anyone
• Make use of a combination of letters and numbers
• Include capital and small letters in the password
• Use numbers to represent letters for instance, 3 for your E and I for you i.
• Have a password that is 10 characters in length.

Regarding the last statement – an eight letter password can still be cracked. It will however take a computer program years to decipher a 10 character password consisting of letters and numbers with capital and smaller letters.

In addition also hide sheets which you want to keep confidential. This will be done when the program closes. It will force the person to enable Macros to be able to view the hidden spreadsheets. Unfortunately the person can just disable the macros and use an add-in for un-hiding of the sheets. The best advice is to have strong passwords to protect your Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.