The Hidden Danger of PDF Files with Embedded QR Codes


The SonicWall Capture Labs threat research team has been observing PDF files with QR codes being abused by malware authors to deceive users for a long time.

QR codes are increasingly popular due to their versatility and ease of use. Beyond payments and feedback, QR codes have a wide range of applications across various industries such as marketing, retail, education, healthcare, hospitality, transportation, real estate, public services, entertainment, business operations, personal use etc. Malware authors are efficiently taking advantage of its popularity. Sonicwall researchers observed that a lot of PDF files are coming from emails (fax) containing QR Codes asking users to scan with smart phone camera.

Read more…
Source: Sonicwall


Sign up for our Newsletter


Related:

  • 19-Year-Old TLS Vulnerability Weakens Modern Website Crypto

    December 13, 2017

    A vulnerability called ROBOT, first identified in 1998, has resurfaced. Impacted are leading websites ranging from Facebook to Paypal, which are vulnerable to attackers that could decrypt encrypted data and sign communications using the sites’ own private encryption key. The vulnerability is found in the transport layer security protocol used for Web encryption. A successful attack could ...

  • Why bother cracking PCs? Spot o’ malware on PLCs… Done. Industrial control network pwned

    December 12, 2017

    Security researchers have demonstrated a new technique for hacking air-gapped industrial control system networks, and hope their work will encourage the development of more robust defences for SCADA-based systems. Air-gapped industrial networks are thought to be difficult if not impossible to hack partly because they are isolated from the internet and corporate IT networks. However, in ...

  • Process Doppelgänging: New Malware Evasion Technique Works On All Windows Versions

    December 7, 2017

    A team of security researchers has discovered a new malware evasion technique that could help malware authors defeat most of the modern antivirus solutions and forensic tools. Dubbed Process Doppelgänging, the new fileless code injection technique takes advantage of a built-in Windows function and an undocumented implementation of Windows process loader. Ensilo security researchers Tal Liberman and Eugene Kogan, who ...

  • Hackers are scanning computers worldwide for open Bitcoin and Ethereum wallets…

    November 27, 2017

    Security researcher Didier Stevens setup a trap, or in digital security terms – a “honeypot”.  Think of it as digital sting operation, where someone puts a server online open to attack – but nothing of value is really there, it’s only there to record the attacks as they happen. The logs of these honeypots revealed hackers ...

  • New Mirai Variant Found Spreading like Wildfire

    November 23, 2017

    A security researcher reportedly discovered a new variant of Mirai (identified by Trend Micro as ELF_MIRAI family) that is quickly spreading. A notable increase in traffic on port 2323 and 23 was observed over the weekend, with around 100 thousand unique scanner IPs coming from Argentina. The release of the Proof-of-Concept (PoC) exploit code in a public vulnerabilities database was ...

  • HP patches severe code execution bug in enterprise printers

    November 23, 2017

    HP has issued firmware patches to fix a security flaw which allowed attackers to perform remote code execution attacks on enterprise-grade printers. FoxGlove Security researchers issued an advisory disclosing the technical details of the bug, CVE-2017-2750, earlier this week. The team tested out HP’s PageWide Enterprise Color MFP 586 and the HP Color LaserJet Enterprise M553 models, and found they ...