Office documents and PDF files might contain certain elements that can be used to run some commands on your PC. These malicious files when opened on your PC will launch some programs or run commands that can result in infection, take over or download of malicious software.
While most of the modern antivirus software are able to both scan and clean such documents, you can analyze them yourself using an online tool provided by Tylabs.com. This online tool is able to scan many different types of files such as Microsoft Word (doc, docx), Microsoft Excel (xls, xlsx), Microsoft PowerPoint (ppt, pptx), Rich text documents (RTF), PDF, and more.
This tool is able to scan for the active content such as ActiveX, VBA, Macros, JavaScript and Shell commands. It is able to detect some of the known exploits and can display their CVE codes as well so we can see more information about those exploits.
Here is how you can scan for malicious Office documents or PDF files online :
- Use your desktop web browser to visit https://scan.tylabs.com/.
- Click on the Browse button and select the PDF file or Office document that you want to scan.
- Click on the Scan Document or PDF button.
- After uploading the document and analyzing it, you will be presented with the results.
In the results of the scan, we can see the file name, file type, various hashes (md5, sha1, sha256) and the time it took to scan the document. It also displays the similarity and the result in terms of ranking ranging from 0 to 10. A higher score indicates that it might contain active content with exploit code.
The score meter also shows four colors – green, yellow, orange or red. Green color means it is clean document. Yellow means that it has come active content. Orange means that the active content could be high risk. And the red color indicates that it has active content using a known exploit code. When the needle is showing red in the visual meter, then we have to worry as the document is malicious for sure.