Is it surprising that people open unsolicited PDF files?
on July 22nd, 2007 at 9:53 pmActually, not to me. But Kevin Liston at the SANS ISC seems to be surprised by it. Frankly, it only surprises me that it didn’t start sooner. Maybe the spammers have just been waiting for the right moment to pull the trick out. But it didn’t surprise me in the least when I heard people were opening them. Heck, it’s a PDF. People have been somewhat conditioned on not opening Word docs and Excel spreadsheets (that one came up in the post as well, and that did surprise and bother me a bit), but PDFs are the preferred business delivery system and are seen as trustworthy.
A part of the reason that they are seen as trustworthy is that people use them as a method of ensuring their documents can not or have not been altered. Unfortunately, this is a huge myth because anyone with access to Google can learn how to crack PDF’s. This may be getting better (I haven’t kept up with it lately), but it has been atrocious in the past.
Vet
Nope, it’s not surprising to me either, since pdfs have not been one of those historically dangerous file types like a .exe or .msi or something. Even I would be far more amiable to opening a strange pdf, although maybe not on Windows using a default Adobe product since I am a bit paranoid and wouldn’t be all that surprised at new malware aimed at such products.
Everyone who works with corporate customers should be aware of how to copy and/or edit PDF files. Not because we should be able to do that, but simply because eventually everyone asks the question, “How can I edit this PDF I had sent to me…”
D’oh!