Pdf- a surprise for antivirus developers?
- By Wilet Ritz
- Published 05/31/2011
- Internet
- Unrated
Pdf- a surprise for antivirus developers?
The antivirus community is going crazy over something related to PDF and Adobe Reader. There was a blog post which stated, 'Another nasty trick in malicious PDF'. Two observations can be made on the situation available now. One is that it is surprising why PDF is deemed as a surprise by the antivirus fraternity. It is a very common practice to make use of multiple filters at a time so that streams in a PDF file can be encoded. This has been quite a common practice ever since portable document format had been introduced in the year 1993. Multiple filters on a stream is very much a part of the PDF and has been so for quite a long time. Given that virus-scanning software group claims to scan portable document files then it implies that the developer has gone through the PDF Reference and has knowledge about how PDF needs to be parsed. It cannot be said that PDFs are new in today's time because they have been around for long now. Claiming them to be unusual is incorrect because they are everywhere and have only multiplied in number with the passing years. According to the counts offered by Google, there are no less than 300 million portable document format files available online. Another tens of billions are reserved in insurance agencies, banks, government organizations and on your hard drive
too. There is hardly anything in the PDF Reference that should come as a surprise about PDF because it has been very popular for over a decade now.
The second observation regarding the situation is that it is expected from developers to consider the probability that image filter could possibly be used to encode non-image components for infernal purposes. It is important for pdf to word programmers, who professionally write virus detection software programs to work by thinking like virus writers. Just because they did not expect the behavior does not make the file format format wrong. Rather, the programmers failed to anticipate the exploit and offer protection to the public. It is high time that antivirus fraternity worked harder by reading the most recent edition of the PDF Reference. The document which had been quoted in the blog post was an older edition of Adobe that had been published in 2006. The existing PDF Reference is ISO 32000-1:2008, which is officially available from the ISO and Adobe's website, for free!
Three things which are expected from antivirus professionals now:
* To get familiar and comfortable with PDF to word converter technology.
* To stop identifying PDF with just Adobe!
* It would be better to not refer to older version of PDF documentation but the recent version.
The second observation regarding the situation is that it is expected from developers to consider the probability that image filter could possibly be used to encode non-image components for infernal purposes. It is important for pdf to word programmers, who professionally write virus detection software programs to work by thinking like virus writers. Just because they did not expect the behavior does not make the file format format wrong. Rather, the programmers failed to anticipate the exploit and offer protection to the public. It is high time that antivirus fraternity worked harder by reading the most recent edition of the PDF Reference. The document which had been quoted in the blog post was an older edition of Adobe that had been published in 2006. The existing PDF Reference is ISO 32000-1:2008, which is officially available from the ISO and Adobe's website, for free!
Three things which are expected from antivirus professionals now:
* To get familiar and comfortable with PDF to word converter technology.
* To stop identifying PDF with just Adobe!
* It would be better to not refer to older version of PDF documentation but the recent version.
Wilet Ritz
Wilet Ritz created a product named Docsmartz which is actually a PDF to word converter software. It converts PDF files to word document easily. Wilet discusses the ease of using this software and how it helps you with the documentation.
View all articles by Wilet Ritz