Can viruses hide in the characters/text of a Word file (or PDF, etc)

Factual Questions
1

Here’s my problem. Last week I brought my laptop to repair because it often froze and all my folders had a gray shade. They cleaned it and told me there were 20 viruses. :eek:

Always had Avast and it never found ANY viruses, let alone 20. The repair guys specifically said, viruses, not other types of malware, I asked them. A couple of days later, the computer started freezing again and there was a black background on some folders. Brought it to repair again and they told me reformatting could be solution.

Yesterday, again, it froze. No problem with the folders, fortunately, but now I’m obsessed. What if some little basta*d is still hiding somewhere? I scanned with Avast, even the boot-scan, everything seems fine.

I decided to buy a new laptop, I won’t use it to surf the Internet much or at all, BUT there are some Word, LibreOffice and PDF files in the old computer that I absolutely need and typing them is not possible because some documents have hundreds of pages.

So I was thinking about copying the text of the files and pasting them into the body my gmail and send the emails to myself. Then, on the new computer, copying and pasting the text into a Word file. My question is: if in those Word/PDF files in the old computer there’s a virus, will the new files be infected as well? Can viruses hide in the text/characters of an infected file?

O is it just overkill? I definetely don’t want to use a flash drive. And I’m not sure about attaching the whole file into a gmail.

I don’t trust antiviruses much anymore, at least in my case since Avast didn’t even detect one of the 20 viruses! And even after reformatting the computer still freezes (sure, it could be the RAM, motherboard etc) but it froze long before the folders had gray/black background.

Yes, I’m obsessed, but I just want my new computer to be as clean as possible, and I definitely need those old files. I can’t work on Word files on a computer that freezes all of a sudden, it just causes me to lose too much work.

I trust those repair guys, I don’t think they lied when they said there were 20 viruses. I can’t be 100% sure, but 99,9% I think they were honest. I just can’t believe Avast didn’t detect even one of them

Thank you everyone!

2

There haven’t been Word viruses in over a decade, and those were macro viruses that only affected Word.

PDF files are very unlikely to have viruses since they are data only, with nothing to run. It’s possible to embed a link in one, but you’d have to click on the link.

3

thanks. but if the folders were infected (the folders icons had gray shades before the cleaning, and black background after the cleaning) I suppose even the Word files, contained in those folders were infected, or at least there’s a chance they were, and maybe still are. Sorry I don’t know much about this, as you noticed

4

The stuff you’re talking about makes no sense. Folders don’t change shade as a result of malware.

5

Here is an overview of a bunch of old PDF malware. Like Word malware, they rely on vulnerabilities in the reader software, even though everything is “data only”. Emailing or copying infected files will not clean them.

That said, if you are so worried about it, just scan the computer with more than one program. HitmanPro will automatically run your files through a few.

6

Word files are probably safe as long as you’re using a modern version of Office (that blocks macros by default). **PDF files, however, can be used to spread malware. **

To be honest, though, it sounds more like you have a hardware problem, or just badly corrupted system files or drivers (possibly from an infection that’s since been removed), than an active infection.

the best way to be confident a system isn’t affected is by scanning it with multiple antimalware products. You’ve already done avast and that says it’s clean. Next step would be to download the portable version of a couple of other tools I’d suggest superantispyware for one of them, since it doesn’t require internet access to run (blocking antivirus software sites is standard procedure for most active malware). Whatever you use, download it on a computer you know is clean (e.g. a work computer or public library), copy it to a flash drive, and connect only that flash drive to the suspect computer (so you don’t spread a possible infection).

If you do want to go clean and just backup the important files, I’d suggest using the suspect computer to upload your needed file to a cloud storage provider like Google Drive, dropbox, etc… This ensures that your new computer gets only the files you choose (Windows makes spreading infected files via shared drives a trivial task for malware authors).

7

We’re missing something here. Where did you take it, and why do you trust them?

Avast is what I use myself. Every so often, I scan my computer with other programs; I seldom find any problems. I find it hard to believe that it would miss 20 out of 20 viruses. Furthermore, true viruses aren’t all that terribly common anymore; the real problem areas are other forms of malware. Even if you were running without any security software, and you were downloading a bunch if illegal torrents, I’m not sure that even then you would have 20 actual viruses.

It’s more likely that you have a hardware problem or possibly a severe memory leak.

8

I want to specify the Word files and PDF were created by me, therefore there are no links, etc. The words are “safe” because I typed them. I’m simply afraid there’s some virus in there.

Anyway, I took it to privately-owned repair store. I took there other computers in the past and they always seemed to do a good job. They also have hundreds of 4 and 5 star reviews on Yelp. In any case, they just seem honest.

9

Sounds more like a graphics problem, either card or drivers. Or even the port that holds the card.

10

Ok so what could that be? It started only one folder, then progressively all the others.

11

Thanks. I’ll do something similar, I think. Do you think Google Drive is safer (more easily detects malware) than Microsoft OneDrive?

Also, the Word and PDF files were created by me, I typed the words, so in theory they should be “safe”, either copying and pasting on the body of the email or using Google Drive/One drive.

12

Hold up… there are so many layers to this.

  1. If your primary concern right now is just to be able to safely read your old documents, upload all of them to Google Drive and read them online there. If it’s a Word document, Google Drive should ask you to convert them to Google Docs format, and any viruses (unlikely to begin with) are even more unlikely to survive the conversion. Your text, on the other hand, should make it through just fine. Also, any PDFs you upload should be opened by default with Chrome’s internal PDF viewer, which is an entirely different program from Adobe Reader. Any malware coded to take advantage of Adobe Reader’s flaws shouldn’t be able to survive and also affect Google Chrome’s built-in PDF reader. And yes, you might also benefit from Google Drive’s virus scanner, but I doubt it’s going to do a much better job of what your own and the repair shop’s have already done.

In the long run, it is probably safer to write all your documents in Google Docs to begin with and move away from desktop office suites. Infecting a Google Doc is much, much more difficult than infecting a local file on your computer as long as you don’t start installing third-party extensions and apps with your Google Docs.

  1. Your problems on the old computer don’t really sound like malware to begin with… maybe a hardware issue instead, or another program? Specifically, what do you mean by the “folders turned gray”? Did you have any sort of cloud backup/sync solution installed?

  2. Are you sure the repair shop specifically identified “virus” instead of using that a shorthand for malware? A lot of “virus” scanners scan everything from old-school viruses & trojans to malware to spyware to old cookies and registry entries and bundle it all up in a big, flashy warning in order to make it seem like it’s the viral apocalypse. Sensationalism is how they sell their product. And a repair shop might not really want to get into the details about what is a virus vs trojan vs malware; they may not even really know, and might just have a standard procedure for running a set of programs and clicking buttons to remove/clean.

  3. With an up-to-date version of Windows and Chrome and safe browsing habits, you shouldn’t really need third-party anti-virus program at all anymore. There are in fact issues with some of them now, as they get bloated over time, which can cause browsing problems – with Avast, for example, it hijacks your SSL connections with its own fake security certificates, and sometimes that causes issues with websites and browsers.

13

Thanks for your message, very useful.

  1. Basically, I want to move my documents from the suspect computer to the new one, but I want to be 100% I’m not transferring the virus/malware with them. I don’t have to simply read them, I still need to work on them.

So, as you suggest, this is a good idea, uploading them to Google Drive, converting them and then download them into new computer as PDF or .docx, or work directly on GDrive.

  1. There was a sort of gray shade on the bottom half of the folder icons. First only one folder, then, after a few minutes, all the others looked the same. After the cleaning, a couple of folders had a black background.

Yes, I have Microsoft cloud, OneDrive, installed.

  1. Yes, they said virus, because when I said that, once home, I was going to install Malwarebytes they said they were all viruses, not other stuff.
14

It could be painful, but you could scan and copy a word file (or part of it) to the clipboard and then put it into a new word file. Or even email it to yourself and do it on the new computer. Of course, you would lose the formatting.

15

Files created by you can only be a problem if you got infected with, for example, a Word virus and it went searching for .doc files and infected those as well. Not at all that likely.

One way to be sure to get rid of such problems is to export the file into something like an RTF file. Send that to the new computer. Then import it back into Word.

Similarly, with a PDF file what I do sometimes for other reasons is “print” it to a PDF file. (This gets rid of idiotic protections so I can copy and paste stuff.)

Adobe’s PDF reader software is so notoriously unsecure that it’s a very good idea to use something else. I prefer Foxit Reader.

Anyway, regarding the finding and removal of viruses. This is very, very hard. Even a standard PC shop can’t find and fix them all. Ditto the latest AV software.

Buying a new laptop is overkill in many situations. Backup the data files, etc. Wipe the drive, reinstall. That will take care of almost all crapware. (Unfortunately, not all.)

16

For Icon issues, first delete the Icon Cache:

Deleting the Icon Cache solves a lot of icon issues.

In answer to you original question, no, nothing survives plain test, if you could actually achieve that, which is very difficult to get 100.0000000% right. Security agencies don’t even bother to attempt that. If you need the extra 0.00000001%, you can print it out and scan it back in to a clean machine.

Personally, I wouldn’t worry about the extra 0.00000001%, because,

FWIW, I don’t think you hav an active virus infection.

17

This is a big, huge, blinking, alarm-flashing, siren-squacking red flag. I’m not going to claim you couldn’t have 20 viruses without a modern virus detector finding them…actually, yes I am going to claim that. I could see it missing one or two, but twenty? In 2017? No way.

If they make a claim like that again, ask for a specific list of the viruses and how they found them.

18

That is not correct in two ways. First: PDF files can contain executable code!

Second: even files that are just data can carry exploits because the thing that’s reading the file is an executable, and if the data is formatted in a way that finds a bug in the reader application, boom.

Here’s a list of 500+ known Acrobat Reader vulnerabilities.

However, none of that is likely relevant to the OP’s question.

OP

  1. Whoever you took your computer to sounds like they’re full of it. “We found a bunch of viruses”, “oh, maybe try reformatting” are just stock answers they give everyone because they don’t know what they’re doing. Find someone else to work on your computer.

  2. Copying the text through gmail is not really a good solution here because it doesn’t solve any realistic threat model. You probably don’t really have any viruses at all. But, it won’t hurt anything, so if it makes you feel better and you don’t mind copying a bunch of stuff, go for it.

  3. A (much?) easier way to do this might be to copy the text into new Google Docs documents. You can probably keep most of the formatting that way.