Comment by lovedswain

5 years ago

9 times out of 10, through the front door. Some shit in a .doc, .html or .pdf. The Google-China hack started with targetted pdfs

12 comments

lovedswain

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diarrhea  5 years ago

If people didn't allow macros in Excel, stayed in read-only mode in Word and only opened sandboxed PDFs (convert to images in sandbox, OCR result, stitch back together), we would see a sharp decline in successful breaches. But that would be boring.

  • pitaj  5 years ago

    I think opening all PDFs in a browser would be good enough™ as browser sandboxes are about as secure as sandboxing gets.

    • dilyevsky  5 years ago

      Operation aurora happened when most people still used IE and some used Opera (i did) and very few Firefox and others

ducktective  5 years ago

How such an attack is even possible? A bug in the LibreOffice, browser, or Evince?

  • yjftsjthsd-h  5 years ago

    PDF is a nightmare format, including such gems as javascript IIRC; it's not surprising that it can be used to make exploits in reader software.

    • ducktective  5 years ago

      So the attacker has to have exploits in every pdf reader app on linux? Since it is not Adobe only and there are quite a few. Or maybe a common backend engine (mupdf and popler)...

      4 replies →

  • npsimons  5 years ago

    Remember how Adobe removed Flash support from Acrobat a couple of years back? Attacks like this are why. Well, and Flash had other issues, too.

    I'm not sure when you started using PDFs (I remember mid-90s when my Dad told me about this cool new document format that would standardize formats across platforms, screen and paper!), but hardly anything is static any more.

  • lovedswain  5 years ago

    The nexus of unsafe programming languages and exploit markets, where for the right price you can purchase undisclosed bugs basically ready to use. Modern offensive security is essentially a bit like shopping in Ikea