Masquerading as a Trustworthy Entity through Portable Document File (PDF) Format

Statistics indicate that more than 1000 phishing attacks are launched every month. With 57 million people hit by the fraudulent attacks so far in America alone, a million-dollar question crops up - how to combat phishing? This paper aims to discuss strategies in the war against phishing. It is an examination of the ways adopted at various levels to counter the crescendo of phishing attacks and new techniques being evolved for the same. All across the globe today, Adobe Portable Document Format stands as the most popularly used and trusted document description format. The overriding objective is to exhaustively explore and evaluate the risk attached to PDF in terms of masquerading as a trustworthy entity which could successfully result in an attack. A few risk reduction security measures at the users´ level are also suggested. This work intends to increase the awareness and understanding of the internet user throughout the world. Furthermore, an effort has been put in to even discuss plausible countermeasures. This conceptual paper is definitely expected to contribute to future research on similar and related topics as spin off from this study.