Rendershock Weaponizing Trust in File Rendering Pipelines

RenderShock is a comprehensive zero-click attack strategy that targets passive file preview, indexing, and automation behaviours in modern operating systems and enterprise environments. It leverages built-in trust mechanisms and background processing in file systems, email clients, antivirus tools, and graphical user interfaces to deliver payloads without requiring any user interaction.

Unlike traditional phishing or malware campaigns requiring a user’s active participation, RenderShock uses standard system behaviours and trusted automation features to perform malicious actions ranging from reconnaissance and data exfiltration to credential theft and remote code execution. By embedding malicious logic in metadata, preview triggers, and document formats, RenderShock capitalizes on system convenience as an unguarded attack vector.

This report provides an in-depth exploration of the RenderShock framework, its attack methodology, real-world style payload examples, payload delivery mechanisms, and impact potential. It includes advanced engineering techniques such as reverse shells, metadata poisoning, and multi-stage payloads, all executed silently within trusted process contexts. It concludes with a comprehensive set of defense strategies broken down into strategic, tactical, and operational layers.

What makes RenderShock uniquely dangerous is not simply the reuse of known payload formats, but its orchestration of passive execution chains that transform familiar primitives into unmonitored, zero-click attack surfaces. By chaining legitimate automation features with novel file behaviours, RenderShock elevates these tactics to a near-zero-day capability, requiring no social engineering or explicit execution to achieve compromise.

To read the complete article see: Rendershock: Weaponizing Trust in File Rendering Pipelines .