Rogue PDFs Behind 80% of Exploits In Q4 '09

CWmike writes "Just hours before Adobe is slated to deliver the latest patches for its popular PDF viewer, ScanSafe announced that by its counting, malicious Adobe Reader documents made up 80% of all exploits at the end of 2009. In the first quarter of 2009, malicious PDF files made up 56% of all exploits tracked by ScanSafe. That figure climbed above 60% in the second quarter, over 70% in the third and finished at 80% in the fourth quarter. Mary Landesman, a ScanSafe senior security researcher, said, 'Attackers are choosing PDFs for a reason. It's not random. They're establishing a preference for Reader exploits.' Exactly why hackers choose Adobe as their prime target is tougher to divine, however. 'Perhaps they are more successful,' she said. 'Or maybe it's because criminal attackers are human, too. We respond when we see a lot of people going after a particular product... We all want to go after that product, too. In the attacker arena, they might be thinking, 'Gee, all these reports of Adobe Reader zero-days, maybe I should get in on them too.'"

Comments

Or more likely

[FreeUser]

How about "Adobe Reader is the only relevant PDF reader on the market"? Is it really that hard to understand?

Or how about:

"Adobe Reader is shit. Zero day exploits are like shooting ducks in a barrel." Or maybe "It's the platform, and Adobe is just the vector de jour. IE was last months, Office the month before that, and Flash (or something equally widespread, complex, superfulous and buggh) is next month's ..."

Microsoft Windows users are known as the road-kill of the Information Superhighway for a reason, and Adobe can only take some small credit for their contribution to that.

Adobe is a security nightmare

[Coopjust]

(Note: Trying not to slashvertise, just sharing some info about a program that's helped me stay secure. I have no affiliation with Secunia, I just like the tool a lot.)

I scan with Secunia's (a Danish computer security company) freeware tool to check if I have insecure applications.

3 times out of 4, when something has a category 4 or category 5 exploit (e.x. click2own), it's Adobe Flash Player, Shockwave, AIR, Reader/Acrobat, etc.

It's also interesting because it tells you if your browsers are insecure (due to plugins or the browser itself). Both IE8 and Chrome are insecure in current versions with all patches.

It was pretty eye opening for me, because I thought that I kept secure, but I had 20 insecure applications when I first got the scanner. I'm always skeptical about getting stuff for free, but I imagine that Secunia uses the data to improve the accuracy of their business software.

To return to the story topic... when possible, use Adobe alternatives (e.x. Sumatra instead of Adobe Reader) and check your flash player and shockwave player versions at least once a week.

Firefox Users can use Mozilla's plugin check.

One more thing in my diatribe...recent versions of the Shockwave Player don't update correctly. I installed the latest version to fix a couple critical vulnerabilities only to find out that it wouldn't reomve the vulnerable files from my system directory. I had to download the Shockwave uninstaller, reboot my PC, reinstall shockwave, and reboot again. I felt like I was back on Windows 9x again.