[PLUG] scanning pdfs for viruses

[Daniel Hedlund]

On Sat, Jan 8, 2011 at 23:53, Keith Lofstrom <keithl at kl-ic.com> wrote:
> Every once in a while, J. Random Technophile adds something cool to
> my Server Sky wiki.  Recently, someone added a PDF attachment.  PDFs
> apparently can contain viruses, so I opened this in a locked-down
> account to make sure the content is OK, then uploaded it to an online
> file virus scanner (virustotal.com) .  Any other suggestions?

Most viruses are targeted toward Adobe reader and Windows.  I'm not
sure I'd worry too much if you keep your system up to date and are
using a reader such as evince or okular.  If you still have your
doubts...

1. You could upload the file to Google Docs and then view the PDF as HTML.
2. You could use a command like 'pdftotext' or 'pdftohtml' to extract
the meat of the content.
3. You could use Google Chrome's new built-in PDF viewer which is
supposed to render PDFs to HTML and do so within a sandbox.
4. You could just delete the file.


Cheers,

Daniel Hedlund
daniel at digitree.org