Can a png file imbed malware on harddrive.

urbancamper

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Apr 10, 2011
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So I was looking for a nice png to replace the gaudy orange icon a certain gaming company uses for their shortcut.

I did a png search on my computer after I found a nice one. I was thinking this might be a nice place to put it. in the past I had always put them in the same folder as the program. Thought I would do it differently this time.

Anyway, after my search was done, I found 2 png images from gaming clans I had visited. One was yesterday, and the other one I had not visited in many months. I use CCleaner daily and also have a registry cleaner, that I back it up with. My antivirus also supposedly stops tracking cookies and the like.

The one I found yesterday kind of bothered me, but the one from several months back is really baffling me. I did a fresh install about 3 weeks ago and there is no way an icon from that clan should be on my computer, yet there it was.

Is it possible these gaming clans imbed spyware in the ssd system reserved place. I add that I am retired and do nothing but game all day. I have been to many gaming community sites, these 2 however are the only ones that have installed png files in my system that have not deleted with my daily cleaning.

 
Solution
Basically, images can't contain malware. Complicatedly, yes, but it'd require some actual executed program to know what to do with the file, but that is very unlikely.

ollpu

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Jan 1, 2014
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Basically, images can't contain malware. Complicatedly, yes, but it'd require some actual executed program to know what to do with the file, but that is very unlikely.
 
Solution

urbancamper

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Apr 10, 2011
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Thanks found my own solution. turns out the png files were from teamspeak. They both were in the ts folder. Forgot I had visited the sites. Sorry for the time wasted. DOH