Problem

Assume you receive an e-mail, which appears to come from a senior manager in your company, with a subject indicating that it concerns a project that you are currently working on. When you view the e-mail, you see that it asks you to review the attached revised press release, supplied as a PDF document, to check that all details are correct before management release it. When you attempt to open the PDF, the viewer pops up a dialog labeled "Launch File" indicating that "the file and its viewer application are set to be launched by this PDF file." In the section of this dialog labeled "File," there are a number of blank lines, and finally the text "Click the ‘Open' button to view this document." You also note that there is a vertical scroll-bar visible for this region. What type of threat might this pose to your computer system should you indeed select the "Open" button? How could you check your suspicions without threatening your system? What type of attack is this type of message associated with? How many people are likely to have received this particular e-mail?