Hackers 'looking to weaponize Facebook Ad Manager' via trojan in PDF reader | Hacker News Reader

Hackers 'looking to weaponize Facebook Ad Manager' via trojan in PDF reader

kontackt.co

51 pointskontackt20 comments

Maybe it says something about a broken ecosystem when every user needs to go trawl search engines to find an application that can read and edit PDFs

Why do people need PDF readers anyway? Chrome browser and all the major OSs ship with one.

Is this because of the users of old Windows versions? If yes, then good news: once those disappear, those attacks would die off as well.

> Why do people need PDF readers anyway? Chrome browser and all the major OSs ship with one.

Because:

- Lost of places on the web, in particular official pages of various government institutions, are still stuck in the age of recommending Acrobat as required to open PDFs.

- Default readers, much like browsers themselves, are woefully inadequate for anything other than casual reading. In case of PDF, it's something where you'd like to be able to edit PDF forms and have a working annotation functionality.

Myself, I use a third party PDF reader on Windows (Drawboard PDF), because it's very touch and pen friendly - and I like to annotate my PDFs, for which a pen-capable device is extremely well-suited.

thank you for explaining your end of this issue as some people do not see it this way and trolls are trolls i guess

Because browser PDF viewers are very basic quick-and-dirty preview tools and lack a lot of features. The most glaring omission is fillable form support but there is a lot of other stuff that's missing or renders plain wrong.

If you need support for OCGs (layers) or want to do additional markups or manipulation then you need a real PDF reader.

Consider how architects and engineers would use PDF plans of a high rise building.

I feel like the article had a weird focus on the idea of fake news that was unrelated to the issue. The bigger problem is users installing things and giving permissions too easily.

The article is a lame copy-paste job from a Bleeping Computer report. Of course it was all over the place.

lol... I looked at another article this account submitted.

They copied everything from another site, including the copyright:

"This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 17, 2019.

Note to readers: This is a corrected story. An earlier version stated that the majority of LifeLabs customers were in Ontario and Quebec.

YES IT IS BUT STILL WITH 6.9K VIEWS LATER WHOS Bitching the news is out let the people choose and if copy right is a issue for you, you must not be much of a internet savy person after all a small group of people who were upset with the lack of privacy to accounts and constent hacks to facebook we thought we should develop a social network and at least try our run at the go but we do not follow dmca policy's on our website

Did... did... did you just admit to spamming HN just for the clicks?

wow... you're really not that smart, are you?

this is a really big issue that still stands to date! i Agree

I've heard stories from other ad managers where accounts were hacked and used to advertise foreign dropship jewelery websites. The websites would get free advertising from the hacked account.

I was witness to something like this. Employee of a rather large agency I was consulting on an account with signed into a cyber cafe in a foreign country and got their FB account stolen. For reasons beyond me an agency spending a good 10mm+ a month on Facebook ads didn't have 2fa required for employees and 20k was spent on an a middle eastern dropshipping store overnight before anyone caught it.

Isn't an issue with Facebook that personal and professional accounts are often linked?

Aren't they always? You need to link it to some account and Facebook doesn't allow creating two personal accounts.

You're correct. It's mandatory to have a personal account to access a business account.

It's required actually.

We Do Not We Just Are Against The Idea Of Not Having Freedom Of Speech Thank You

Note to HN admins: This account signed up recently and is now spamming HN with its own links.... aka... a spammer.

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