I can see it now: "New worm infects PDFs, causes users viewing them to mine Bitcoin."
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
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PDFs have been an attack vector for a while actually.
One more reason never to use the official adobe software. SumatraPDF is awesome. Barebones and blazing fast.
Anti adobe is cool - the recommendation is appreciated... but any software can be the target of a document based exploit and may well be susceptible to the same exploit depending on the libraries used. Additionally, smaller software projects can take longer to update as they have less staff working on them. Absolutely support open software and alternatives... Just a word of caution.
I don't think it has to do with opening a PDF in Adobe, but okay.
Yeah it does. Adobe has a lot of active script support, including java script for example, which can be exploited. If a software can't interpret those scripts at all and simply displays plain text, that means malware won't be executed.
And since Adobe Acrobat / Acrobat Reader are the most common pdf viewers out there, they are a natural target for hackers as well.
Is Acrobat the only pdf reader with active script support? For example, do the common browsers which can also open pdfs not support the same things?
I genuinely don't know, I have set my browser to download pdfs by default and only open them with Sumatra. There might be a scripting layer active in the browser as well though, quite possible.
Then would you agree that it doesn't have to do with Adobe Acrobat, as much at it does active script in PDFs and if the reader executes it?
If you view it on your system it's a vector. Large / complex documents which may parse things with different libraries just happen to have a larger attack surface.
This was the thought that entered my head. Kids these days didn't live through rampant vbscripts running off the onLoad event.
Pretty sure that was already a thing years ago.