piatkow - 9:48 am on Mar 5, 2012 (gmt 0)

Is it possible for any kind of bug to hide in an image file and go back to infect the site stealing the image?

If possible I think it would hit the visitor rather than the offending site. It would also be a criminal offence in many countries.

In a similar thread on another board somebody had a hotlinker taken off ebay by substituting raunchy images for the product images and then reporting them for a ToS breach!

There are ways to block hotlinking in .htaccess or, if that is an problem for you, you can simply rename the hotlinked images.