JPEG Trojan Horse and the Pocket PC? Safe for now…

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not after you... The new "JPEG" image exploit/Trojan horse affecting many Windows-based operating systems and programs including Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Office XP,
Office 2003, Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1, Project, Visio, Picture It and Digital Image Pro is making the rounds of the interweb. If the modified JPEG is viewed on an unpatched system, the host computer (if unprotected) will try to connect up to a site via FTP and download a bunch of applications to take over the newly 0wned machine. The good news is you can update your system here, and the FTP site(s) have so far been shut down or blocked; the bad news is that this flaw is likely going to be a new platform for compromising users' systems.

So, all that said we tested our Pocket PCs with a compromised JPEG and after looking at the packets with
PhatNet (most excellent tool for the Pocket PC) it doesn't appear that the Pocket PC operating system is in any way affected by the Trojan horse. Which makes sense since the exploit connects up via ftp, something you can't exactly do on a Pocket PC, only a full Windows system. But there's no reason to assume we're out of the woods just yet, there are a lot of people who are going to use this exploit so we'll just need to see what happens next and keep patching. This is going to be a hard one to stop.