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Hey,
Im a newbie and know some visual basic- a mate of mine recently made a program to hide messages in the footers of images. Now i was wonder when you open a jpg it executes the code to show the image, could this be a possible exploit in that you could hide vbs script to do anything you wanted ?
havent tried it - just thought id share it with everyone seeing as im a newbie and may not be good enough to do it... some people may! if u can then tell me and antivirus companies =)
Images do not execute. They are data. As it stands today, there is
nothing to exploit. You could embed anything you want in an image file,
including scripts, viruses, or whatnot, but the OS, the image viewer prog,
or internet browser is not designed to regard the image file as
executable code.
:cool:
There was actually a thread about this in the last week. You have to install something on the computer ahead of time to get the code to run. An image doesn't actually run, your image viewing program does...
I read an article earlier today about something similar to this.
The virus was encoded inside the jpg file, but the only way to launch the virus was to have also had a "handler" program that actually took the .jpg association and then executed the code contained in the jpg. Once that code was run, it passed the picture file on to the appropriate viewer.
Definately not an easy way to be attempting to infect targets.
Images *cannot* contain viruses, neither do they have footers. Images aren't executable (only readable and writable), so any virus code implemented in them will never execute. If an image did contain virus code, it would be the image viewer that executed it, but then it would be your fault for downloading a dodgy graphics package off the net. :)