Keldrin writes:
"Zeus is a trojan designed to steal banking credentials, and has been declared one of the most successful pieces of malware currently seen in the wild. A new variant is making detection far more difficult for anti-virus companies by hiding configuration settings inside pictures. At the moment, the malware simply encodes the configuration with Base64, passes them through XOR and RC4, then attaches them to the end of an image file. This makes for an 'infected' file that is much larger than the original. There is speculation that future releases of the malware will be able to detect minuscule changes to the colors of individual pixels, making the affected files much harder to detect."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tynin on Friday February 21 2014, @03:05PM
Indeed, also having some running process open up specific pictures and inspecting them would eventually get noticed as well. Still, an interesting concept.