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January 03, 2006
A virus that works simply by viewing an image... sigh
At one time in my younger days I would have said this was impossible but it turns out its real. You can get infected by a virus simply by viewing a file. Here is a link to the entry on the F-Secure web site which talks about the problem.
For the technically minded the vulnerability has to do with a feature Microsoft put into their WMF format. The feature was a piece of code that could be embeded into a WMF file. The function was designed to be called by Windows if a print job needed to be canceled during spooling. Sadly, the feature can be (and now IS being) exploited to hack into other people's systems.
This is an incredibly easy and nearly unstopable virus. Sigh.
The initial work-around can be found at www.hexblog.com.
Posted by rakhier at January 3, 2006 10:45 AM