Researchers discovered malware on the pirated digital version of Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury inside the Trump White House book which can grant hacker’s remote access to reader’s PC.
Researchers discovered malware on the pirated digital version of Michael Wolff’sFire and Fury inside the Trump White House book which can grant hacker’s remote access to reader’s PC.The malware was first highlighted by Kaspersky Lab researcher Michael Molsner and reported by Daily Beast.
The file contains a PDF version of Fire and Fury and windows executable file which can give hackers remote backdoor access to victim's device.The digital copies sold by official retailers like Amazon and Apple are not affected by the malware.The copies which are available on the torrenting site and social media for free may be affected by this malware said, researchers.The malware infected fake digital version contain the same cover as the original version, but the total number of pages is less than the original version.
Read more on:Dark Caracal, a new Malware Espionage Campaign Targets Android DevicesIn the original version the page count is 328, but in the spoof version, it contains only around 230 pages.Giovanni Vigna, co-founder and CTO at security firm Lastline said to IBTimes UK that “It is very difficult to determine if a PDF is unsafe, unless the user is able to analyse the file with the tools normally used by malware analysts, This is why the users should use anti-malware tools with every document they open.”"Cybercriminals using PDF books for this purpose is not very common, as the level of interest is usually low. However, this book has had such publicity that it made sense to the cybercriminals to create a weaponised version."Earlier this month Wikileaks shared a link to the full version of PDF and Cryptome another activist group also published a trimmed copy of this. However, now both of these links are not active.The malware can be detected by antivirus software so users who downloaded the digital copy of the book can scan and check whether they are infected or not.
Read more on:Skygofree Malware Can Secretly Record Audio And Steal Whatsapp Messages