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Adobe Warns of Reader, Acrobat Attack
itwbennett writes "Monday afternoon, Adobe 'received reports of a vulnerability in Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.2 and earlier versions being exploited in the wild,' the company said in a post to the company's Product Security Incident Response Team blog. According to malware tracking group Shadowserver, the vulnerability is due to a bug in the way Reader processes JavaScript code. Several 'tests have confirmed this is a 0-day vulnerability affecting several versions of Adobe Acrobat [Reader] to include the most recent versions of 8.x and 9.x. We have not tested on 7.x, but it may also be vulnerable,' Shadowserver said in a post on its Web site. The group recommends that concerned users disable JavaScript within Adobe's software as a work-around for this problem. (This can be done by un-checking the 'Enable Acrobat JavaScript' in the Edit -> Preferences -> JavaScript window). 'This is legit and is very bad,' Shadowserver added."
Normally that would be my first response as a joke, but I begin to wonder if Adobe could affect anything that is not root-level (or admin level).
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
No one uses Adobe Reader for anything other than business PDF's.
Seriously, The launch time for a PDF off the web is too large for me to bother. First it's gotta download that 7 Meg file, then Adobe's gotta kick start, and then it doesn't let me highlight anything to keep me from copying and pasting.
Seriously - I have only ever seen PDF's used at work and at school, and anywhere else they exist usually aren't worth the bother.
So who are the people taking advantage of these vulnerabilities?
It is high time people stop using any pdf reader that uses javascript or opens external links or does anything other than simply render the document on screen. Editable pdf, where one can fill in the fields etc must be a separate application, not plugged into the browser. I feel safe with NoScript controlling FireFox. Hope someone comes up with a good general purpose sandboxer that will sandbox every plug-in.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I agree. These security vulnerabilities appear to be a weekly occurrence. Anyone that hasn't disabled Javascript in Reader/Acrobat at this point either doesn't care about the numerous vulnerabilities or doesn't understand the risks involved.
The bigger question is why Adobe doesn't just disable Javascript by default. I have never used a PDF that required Javascript and I've dealt with a number of user-fillable forms. So, what exactly is Javascript being used for? I know that it has some use. However, it seems that the security risk is far greater than any potential benefit of the "feature".
I would love a good alternative personally. All my users do is read the PDFs and we use PDFCreator for merging documents. I just havent found one that seems to be solid enough for the enterprise push. Any recommendations from people who have made the switch? I am getting tired of patching every 5 minutes.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
JavaScript in PDFs has always been trouble. I use forms that auto complete, add columns, etc. A compromise might be a default of prompt before running scripts with a recommend/default of "no". I'd always click "no" unless I trusted the source. Since that would marginalize the product it will probably never happen. I wish I had never upgraded from 4.
It's easy enough to disable, but everytime a doc gets loaded with embedded JS, the reader will prompt to enable it with a message saying something like "the document may not display correctly" without it enabled. Clicking the "yes" will then re-enable it. The problem with this approach is that we get so many warnings that people may automatically start enabling JS accidentally.
I have javascript disabled at each user login on our network (through the logon script), just in case someone has re-enabled it when their system was last logged on. I haven't found a way to totally lock it out yet.
The huge problem is that Adobe offers to enable javascript for users when they open a PDF with Javasript in it. It displays a message along the lines of "you're not seeing everything here unless you enable javascript...click here to enable it" with a big friendly "YES" button. Kind of defeats the purpose when it's made so easy for users to re-enable.
I warn users not to enable it, but most either don't care or don't pay attention...and at least 80% of them will always click "YES" or "OK" just to get a message box to go away without reading it. (Invariably followed by a tech call stating "I clicked OK on something...what's wrong with it and why don't you know off the top of your head what I did wrong?")
Nice of Adobe to make it so helpful and user-friendly to re-enable the most dangerous part of their software.
-JJS
> A spreadsheet app is also substantially larger than a PDF reader.
This *is* Adobe we're talking about here. For grins, I just installed Adobe Reader 9.2 and Gnumeric 1.9.16 on a XP VM, and for the informal survey of the "Program Files" directory, Adobe (203MB) weighs in at almost twice that of Gnumeric (106MB).
I vote for using the best app for the job. In the case of this thread, I wholeheartedly think the spreadsheet is that tool.
Method of processing duck feet
No, PDF format is a crippled postscript. It was intentionally crippled so it will NOT be a language, because distributing documents written in a programming language was not secure. Then they realized they crippled it too much, and added javascript to it. It is an improvement, since the scripts are localized in the document, easier to identify, they can be disabled if you want to, etc.
I think in general having scripting language embedded into an interactive document format is a good idea, however, it seems that Adobe's implementation is rather buggy and badly designed.
AccountKiller