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There's this stunning wallpaper that I'd love to have on my desktop. However, it's from a shady site and I'm worried it might contain some kind of a virus. So, first thing I did was to wipe the metadata with exiftool on a live USB to prevent any buffer overflow. Next, I flipped the image in the hope that it'll "flip" the sequence of the potential malicious code in the image, hopefully rendering it useless. Is there anything else I can do to make sure the image is safe to open?

PS please excuse the dumb question. I've been reading about a bunch of exploits that relied on hidden code in images, hence the paranoia.

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  • Download to a disposable USB key and scan the key with your Anti Virus.
    – John
    Oct 2, 2021 at 18:05
  • @John don't these typically escape antivirus software?
    – n00dles
    Oct 2, 2021 at 18:09
  • A good anti virus app should pick up an image containing a virus. You may also wish to scan additionally with Malwarebytes.
    – John
    Oct 2, 2021 at 18:11
  • Cat and mouse game, all av databases are 2 weeks behind the latest malware, download it and let is set for 3 weeks, then scan.
    – Moab
    Oct 2, 2021 at 18:13
  • Paranoia is the word. What you did was more than enough to disable any exploit.
    – harrymc
    Oct 2, 2021 at 19:08

2 Answers 2

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Here's a surefire way not to get owned.

As mentioned you can run it through virustotal.com which checks files using at least 50 antiviruses.

Fire up a virtual machine, open the image in IrfanView, save it in any image format (e.g. BMP, JPG, PNG) and copy the result to your host. This will guarantee there's no hidden malware or any "bad" bytes in the image which can be misinterpreted and lead to code execution.

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Upload it to https://www.virustotal.com/ for checking. There are many scanners there to validate the payload.

This is a page where a file can be automatically scanned using many commercial anti-virus scanners.

Info from the VirusTotal site: "Analyze suspicious files and URLs to detect types of malware, automatically share them with the security community."

It is free to use.

Keep in mind that it is not suitable for any personal data.

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