GetOffMyLan@programming.dev 1 month ago
The file is a serialised java array that contains a pdf file. I’ve seen a few things online about this. Some pdf readers accept it, some don’t.
And I’m not sure why an application would output a pdf this way. But there’s nothing harmful going on.
You’re kind of freaking out about nothing.
I highly recommend Youtube video l6eaiBIQH8k, if you can track it down. You seem to have no general idea about PDF security problems.
And I’m not sure why an application would output a pdf this way. But there’s nothing harmful going on.
Unacceptable. If you can’t explain it, then you don’t understand it. Thus you don’t have answers.
Wow, your paranoia is dialed up to 11.
Don’t Canadian insurance companies want to know where their customers are? Or are the privacy safeguards good there?
In the US, banks and insurance companies snoop on their customers to track their whereabouts. They insert surreptitious tracker pixels in email to not only track the fact that you read their msg but also when you read the msg and your IP (which gives whereabouts). If they suspect you are not where they expect you to be, they take action. It’s perfectly legal in the US to use that sneaky underhanded technique rather than the transparent mechanism described in RFC 2298. If your suppliers are using RFC 2298, lucky you.
Your assertion that the document is malicious without any evidence is what I’m concerned about.
At some point you have to decide to trust someone. The comment above gave you reason to trust that the document was in a standard, non-malicious format. But you outright rejected their advice in a hostile tone. You base your hostility on a youtube video.
You should read the essay “on trusting trust” and then make a decision on whether you are going to participate in digital society or live under a bridge with a tinfoil hat.
In Canada, and elsewhere, insurance companies know everything about you before you even apply, and it’s likely true elsewhere too. Even if they don’t have personally identifiable information, you’ll be in a data bucket with your neighbours, with risk profiles based on neighbourhood, items being insuring, claim rates for people with similar profiles, etc. Very likely every interaction you have with them has been going into a LLM even prior to the advent of ChatGPT, and they will have scored those interactions against a model.
The personally identifiable information has largely been anonymized in these models. In Canada, for example, there are regulatory bodies like OSFI that they have to report to, and get audited by, to ensure the data is being used in compliance with regulations. Each company will have a compliance department tasked with making sure they’re adhering.
But what you will end up doing instead is triggering fraudulent behaviour flags. There’s something called “address fraud”, where people go out of their way to disguise their location, because some lower risk address has better rates or whatever. When you do everything you can to scrub your location, this itself is a signal that you are operating as a highly paranoid individual and that might put you in a bucket. If you want to be the most invisible to them, you want to act like you’re in the median of all categories. Because any outlying behaviours further fingerprint you.
Source: I have a direct connection to advanced analytics within insurance industry (one degree of separation).
It’s literally just the format of the file here. If you skip the java serialisation header it’s a normal pdf file.
I did explain what it is. I just don’t know why certain programs encode it this way.
I’m trying to help you out there’s no need to be a dick.
Hirom@beehaw.org 1 month ago
It’s a fair question. There’s precedent where malware is embedded in PDFs.
GetOffMyLan@programming.dev 1 month ago
Indeed. But the pdf file itself isn’t the issue here.