How can downloading a pdf or word file give you a virus?

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A pdf file doesnt have any special permissions or anything so i cant think of any way that itd be able to
is viewing a pdf file in chrome completly safe?
how does editing a word document leave you more vulnerable than if you were just viewing it?

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33 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The pegasus software famously used a no click exploit they just need your phone number to pwn your device. It worked by sending a PDF as a GIF file through text message to the target device.

In this case, an iPhone, and when the OS opened the file, it didn’t check that the file contents was actually GIF and sees it’s a PDF for opens it anyway as a PDF.

In the PDF there is a specially crafted buffer overflow that exploits how iPhone reads PDF files and allows arbitrary data to be written to outside the memory bounds.

From there they built a rudimentary computer in memory that they could later read or write to/from the entire device.

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