back to article 50 shades of grey can turn Adobe Reader into a hot mess

Hackers can duck antivirus programs and execute malware in Adobe Reader by using greyscale images, says Danish security boffin Dénes Óvári. Lossy compression is thought to be susceptible to the DCTDecode filter, which should nuke malware woven into images and blunt this form of attack. However new intelligence published in …

  1. Destroy All Monsters Silver badge
    Windows

    Detections were duly added to AV products and as a result, the generated PDF files became increasingly obfuscated as malware attempted to circumvent the scanners.

    What an "industry". Managing to allow execution of data streams. Then kludging detectors on top of that to avoid SHTF situations. Only a world economic crash can cleanse us anymore. You could have stopped it!

    I have said it before, I will say it again: OCCUPY BABEL!

    1. JeffyPoooh
      Pint

      I *told* you that the Harvard architecture was better...

      Data .NE. Instructions

      Done.

  2. arctic_haze
    FAIL

    What next?

    I have the feeling that some of the software companies are able to create a text reader susceptible to viruses hidden in plain ASCII.

  3. Tree
    Holmes

    Bloated

    If Adobe Acrobat Reader were not such bloatware it would be obvious when an executable was inside it. The last version that was just a reader was version 3. We do NOT want or need it to execute javascript or other scripts in order to read a document.

  4. 50shades

    Not so good!

    I just readed 50 Shades of grey in pdf format, but I am totally dissapointed.

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