From: Dave Korn (dave.kornartimi.com)
Date: Mon Jul 28 2008 - 11:54:00 CDT

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Petja van der Lek wrote on 28 July 2008 16:22:

> A word of warning might be in order: the PDF is filled with hyperlinks
> to (presumably) live malware sites. Navigating the document is therefore
> not unlike playing Minesweeper. Red flags are not powerups but mean
> "danger". Mis-click to get pwned.

<boggle> You allow your browser to run javascript ... by default? ... or
only specifically when studying malware?

> Stuff like that. You might want to use
> a reader that at least asks for confirmation before it serves up the
> site in your browser (a quick test shows that Adobe Reader 7 as a
> Firefox plugin

<double-boggle> You read PDFs in your browser using the plugin?[*]

> happily opens a link without asking anything, for instance).

  You're barking up the wrong hole here. The problem isn't that if you
click a link in a PDF document viewed in your browser you will browse
straight to it; that's no different than clicking a link on a HTML page
viewed in your browser, and you wouldn't expect it to ask before it followed
a link there. The problem is that you're running untrusted scripts: you're
as vulnerable to getting pwned by an iframe banner ad on MSN or Yahoo as you
are to clumsily clicking a link in a document about malware.

  Seriously, nobody should even be here if they don't appreciate that
they're dealing with live munitions and know how to handle them safely.

    cheers,
      DaveK

[*] - that's not really a security boggle, that's more of a
how-the-hell-long-before-I-get-control-of-my-browser-back-thank-you-very-muc
h-adobe-and-your-godawful-bloatware boggle. Though of course I would still
recommend downloading PDFs with "Save link as..." and viewing them in foxit
so that they're not in the same process space as your browser, just for a
bit of added insulation.
--
Can't think of a witty .sigline today....

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