When Helpful Doesn’t Help

There is a new hack in town well it will be in Las Vegas next week and it’s simple - create a file that looks like one thing to one application and something else to another. Types of file have always been helpful to the OS, it means that you can ‘click’ on a file and it knows what application to use to open it. In this case, this ‘feature’ is what is being used as the exploit. 

Here they have created a file which looks like an innocuous GIF to a web server but is actually a Java applet. The ‘image’ is downloaded but then run by the browser as it thinks it is an applet - result… your machine has just been compromised.

Because it looks like an image, it can be readily uploaded to any and all sites which allow such things (by checking that the upload is a picture), mainly social networking sites - once there, it can then be downloaded by others (who think it is an image) and therefore the infection spreads…

You need to pay a little more attention to what you are downloading - perhaps those latest pictures of Britney are less attractive now?

August 1, 2008 | Filed Under data-loss, security 

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