[roy@gambitmotorsport]

In the cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, written by Neal Stephenson in 1992, a thread was spun about a computer virus capable of infecting by merely viewing a picture. The concept has finally, unfortunately been realized - GIFAR:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/...icleId=9111298

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/...entials_1.html

http://www.gnucitizen.org/blog/more-...erous-attacks/

The basic idea is that a file can contain the headers of a picture to pass through your web browser's security policy, but then carry another file MIME-type code to be later acted upon by a different program on your computer (i.e. JAR -> Java, ZIP -> archive software). Sun will be issuing a patched JVM, other browser add-on/pass-to apps will likely be updating as well. The short story is, be wary of visiting web sites in the near-term with user-posted images. Long-term, history book story, this will probably mostly be noted as theoretical - lets hope... Any site that accepts uploads can implement better scanning procedures to protect against stuff like this.

Hope you found it interesting. My day job sometimes intersects with IT security and I found this one of the greater shifts in what can happen over the past couple of years. Enough to declare that people on networks that need to remain reasonably secure cannot access the web (some would say "duh!").