Attackers embedding back doors into image files

I wonder what programs read the information in the file or header and treat it as executable code ? ? And why would you want to do that, execute code from within an image? Maybe to do cool but useless stuff?

An image file is an image file, and that should be that.

I can see people doing that for make-work and for fun. But is there any practicality or pressing need to do that?

IMHO systems are too complex for their own good! And over the past 15-years have gotten much worse.

 

This is more sofisticated than ones from the early/mid 2k's that some members on here, & elsewhere tested.

@ Keatah

From what i read, it's designed to compromise etc www's & not users directly. See the Sucuri www for more details

 

Even so. Why would a www server want to or need to look into a jpg for executable code? That's just a case of feature creep. Putting stuff in a program just to do something, especially when its not useful.