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Adobe Flaw Heightens Risk of Malicious PDFs

Posted by kdawson on from the driving-by dept.

snydeq writes "Security companies warn of a new flaw in version 9 of Adobe Reader and Acrobat that could compromise PCs merely by the opening of a malicious PDF. Although attacks are not yet widespread, hackers are exploiting the flaw in the wild, gaining control of computers via buffer overflow conditions triggered by the opening of specially crafted PDFs." Adobe is calling the flaw "critical" and says a patch for Reader 9 and Acrobat 9 will be released by March 11.

3 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. I've experienced this by tygerstripes · · Score: 4, Funny

    I just tried to open a .pdf in Reader 9, and it's completely locked up - I've been stuck on the splash screen for 20 minu--

    Oh wait, it's opened now. False alarm, sorry.

    --
    Meta will eat itself
  2. Re:What about Foxit? by InsertWittyNameHere · · Score: 5, Funny

    Foxit has compatibility problems because it doesn't have all of the features of Adobe Reader 9.

    For example it doesn't open the specially crafted PDFs our clients send us at work, which are thoughtfully secured with AntivirusXP2009

  3. Re:What about Foxit? by pipatron · · Score: 4, Funny

    I use AmigaOS, you insensitive clod.

    --
    c++; /* this makes c bigger but returns the old value */