Well, It finally happened. A virus contained in an image

[Matt]

Traditionally viruses could not be contained in popular image file formats such as jpeg or gif. It seems to me that this is a .wmf exploit but I will have to read more.

It has been pretty much the rule of thumb that you were perfectly safe opening these sort of files in an email attachment. Well, if email is not your gig, just imagine viewing an infected web page. It could have the malicious image file displayed to your computer, and them BLAMMO, now your PC is infected simply by viewing a malicious site or infected page.

This exploit only seems to affect Windows based PCs. I have not researched much more on it other than this article, so I am not sure if it is affecting any web browser on windows like FireFox and Internet Explorer, or, if it only affects certain browsers.

I am also not sure of the image format (.jpg .jpeg .gif .png .bmp .etc) that this possible exploit is capable of running under.

If you have any comments feel free to post them.

I am not going to install antivirus on my PCs just yet. I refuse to run it. However if this thing goes on for a long time I might seriously reconsider.

If this thing gets in the wild before a patch is released it would/could be extremely devastating. I doubt Microsoft would allow this exploit to be executed for very long. However, it is an interesting thing to think that a simple image file could actually contain a virus.

Whats next?

Here is the original story