This scary security flaw could let hackers change contracts you already signed

bgrpro65 juin 02, 2021

One news publication I've written a fair amount of content for always required that writers prepare and submit invoices in PDF form, ostensibly because they're less susceptible to manipulation compared to a garden variety text-based document. At least that's what I think the reason for that mandate was, not that it matters to writers much. If that directive is how you get paid, then that's what you do, even though -- well, let's just say that anyone who has held that assumption about the nature of PDFs needs to disabuse themselves of it pretty quickly.

Researchers with Germany’s Ruhr-University Bochum, presenting at this year’s IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, walked through security flaws inherent in PDFs that have already been patched by most applications that read these documents, but the implications here are scary, nonetheless.