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Posted by Roger Wilco on September 23, 2005, 1:46 pm
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> I wonder if anyone ever heard of a real case involving picture
> files embedded with trojan? I know such an idea has been proven
> workable, but is there any real case?
>
> I did a search on the Net and found many sites that say you cannot
> be infected by just viewing pictures but ....
>
> On September 20th, Taiwan's China Times reported that police there
> put into custody five people accusing them of collecting user IDs
> and passwords by spreading porn pictures embedded with trojan,
> apparently some kind of keylogger. According to the news, they
> spread the infected pictures by e-mail or by putting them on web
> sites such as yahoo or kimo and letting people download them.
>
> Over a year, the suspects have collected more than 100,000 user
> IDs and passwords. Because of the amount of the data collected,
> the head of the suspects had to hire other accomplices to help
> processing the data.
>
> Although the news clearly used the term "trojan embedded in porn
> pictures", I'm not convinced that's what really happened.
Someone posted this a while ago, and luckily also posted the actual
article which stated that the trojans executables were "disguised" as
picture files (which is an entirely different thing). While it is true
that data filetypes can be crafted to exploit broken software (viewer
application or OS) I strongly suspect that the article you refer to is
authored by someone who doesn't know the difference or considers the
difference between "being a picture file" and "being disguised as a
picture file" as a matter of semantics.
Just saw news about a levee breach in New Orleans and the newscaster
indicated her belief that the different terms "breach", "overflow", and
"broken" or "failed" were all equivalent and a matter of semantics.
<sigh> She was using all those terms interchangably even while the
'ticker' along the bottom clearly stated the engineers' claim that the
affected levee was still structurally intact - in fact it was expected
to behave in this manner, though not so soon.
Even in here people like to dismiss arguments as a matter of semantics
when in fact there are reasons that different words have different
meanings within certain contexts especially when the those words are
used technically.
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