The is a special invisible character (Unicode U+202E ) used in coding to reverse the order of the characters that follow it. Here is how the trick happened:
In Windows, always check "File name extensions" in the View tab of your folder. A real PDF will end in .pdf , but a trick file might show up as .pdf.exe .
When Elena double-clicked the file, her computer didn't open a PDF reader. Instead, it saw the .exe extension and ran the code.