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Adobe Warns of Critical Zero Day Vulnerability
wiredmikey writes "Adobe issued an advisory today on a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2011-2462) that has come under attack in the wild. According to Adobe, the issue is a U3D memory corruption vulnerability that can be exploited to cause a crash and permit an attacker to hijack a system. So far, there are reports the vulnerability is being exploited in limited, targeted attacks against Adobe Reader 9.x on Windows. However, the bug also affects Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.4.6 and earlier 9.x versions for UNIX and Macintosh computers, as well as Adobe Reader X (10.1.1) and Acrobat X (10.1.1) and earlier 10.x versions on Windows and Mac. Patches for Windows and Mac users of Adobe Reader X and Acrobat X will come on the next quarterly update, scheduled for Jan. 10, 2012."
Why on earth isn't "Adobe Reader X Protected Mode" the default?
You can pretty well set your watch by adobe exploits. Get it together, guys...
Sent from my PDP-11
Jan. 10, 2012? Why not immediately? Do Adobe coders suck that bad... Honestly I think when a major vulnerability is found, companies should fix it immediately or face penalties.
Good I stopped using that blob...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
...leads to increased vulnerability, whether in biology or in software.
Although there are alternatives to Adobe Reader, none of them is good enough to gain significant market share. And Adobe does everything it can to make competing with it more difficult. So a key piece of software used by a large majority of computer users is bloated beyond belief and so riddled with vulnerabilities that it seems there's a new every day. It sucks, but it's hardly surprising.
On the web, as in politics, we get what we deserve - or, in this case, we get what other web users deserve, because they vastly outnumber us.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
If you're wondering "How can this happen?", all you need to do is look at the credits of Acrobat Reader. Notice that many of the names are quite clearly Indian. Then it all makes sense.
According to the Wikipedia article on Universal 3D:
The format is natively supported by the PDF format and 3D objects in U3D format can be inserted into PDF documents and interactively visualized by Acrobat Reader (since version 7).
and
There are four editions to date.
The first edition is supported by many/all of the various applications mentioned below. It is capable of storing vertex based geometry, color, textures, lighting, bones, and transform based animation.
The second and third editions correct some errata in the first edition, and the third edition also adds the concept of vendor specified blocks. One such block widely deployed is the RHAdobeMesh block, which provides a more compressed alternative to the mesh blocks defined in the first edition. Deep Exploration and PDF3D-SDK can author this data, and Adobe Acrobat and Reader 8.1 can read this data.
The fourth edition provides definitions for higher order primitives - curved surfaces.
I'm guessing it's the vendor specified blocks from the 3rd edition that are causing the problem.
In my experience it can (or used to) break things when interacting with other programs.
It broke my LaTeX editor. Couldn't compile a document and automatically have it open in Reader. After some fighting, I think I got it to open, but if you make some edits and recompile... it quickly errors out if you don't manually and completely exit out of Reader first. It's really annoying. Spent far too long reading up on how Reader is supposed to interact with other software and setting my editor to try different commands invoking Reader. No dice, and it looked like the documentation wasn't up to date for all the changes in X yet. But turn off protected mode, and it worked just fine.
Granted, they might have fixed that in the mean time, I've not used it in a couple months, and don't even have Reader installed any more...
I vote based on politicians' actions, unless contrary to my preconceptions. Often wrong, never uncertain. #iamthe99%
Yes.
The attack can be stopped using their Protected Mode. Versions that ship with the protected mode will not be addressed to specifically mitigate this attack until later, with Adobe recommending everyone turn on protected mode to protect them in the mean time.
Whether or not that's a reasonable reaction is a whole different question.
I vote based on politicians' actions, unless contrary to my preconceptions. Often wrong, never uncertain. #iamthe99%
This type of vulnerability is serious enough that I find rather appalling that Adobe is pushing this to their regular "scheduled" quarterly update. If they are serious on being considered as a credible platform, they absolutely need to address these kind of issue with more sense of urgency.
It doesn't do everything Acrobat does, but it reads PDFs. Which is enough for me.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
OK, the summary omits it, but the article says "We are in the process of finalizing a fix for the issue and expect to make available an update for Adobe Reader 9.x and Acrobat 9.x for Windows no later than the week of December 12, 2011" so Reader 9 will be fixed after all.
... because Adobe broke the search feature in the versions after 9.4.0 (both 9.x and 10.x) If you search in a .PDF in the newer versions, it will fail to highlight at least some of the matches.
This is a pretty huge deal and it would be astonishing if it were still broken. Does anybody know if they've fixed the bug?
I'm actually in the process of becoming Adobe free. No Reader, no Flash, and hopefully my system will run better.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I'd be curious to know how many Mac users install Adobe Reader at all, since Preview does a very good job of basic PDF handling - and loads almost instantly, as opposed to Reader's geologic-era-scale load time.
#DeleteChrome
... or maybe just go back a few versions. No movies, no scripting, no interactivity other than hyperlinks and form elements, no live connection to the Web, no motion of any kind. Just vector shapes and a handful of well-known image formats. Please, just go back to what PDF was originally supposed to be: a virtual print that looked the same anywhere, including a small handful of well-known image formats. Oh, and make it "safe", which it never would have occurred to me to ask for in the past but I guess we need to specifically request that that these days. (Hi, GM, can you please make a car without an array of eight-inch spike in the middle of the steering wheel?) And, as long as I've got this crackpipe, I'll ask them to make the spec simple enough and open enough that anyone can make a program to generate them or read them.
I don't know what features Adobe is packing into the spec these days but to the best of my knowledge there's nothing I do today that couldn't be handled by PDF 1.2 and Acrobat 3. The only problem is, when people make PDFs, they tick the little box that says "Require Acrobat _ or greater" and I always have to update.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Most of our technical manuals come in PDF form now, but thank God for Okular. It has really, really improved. :)
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
...if you're going to follow up your "zero" day announcement to the world with a statement that your "fix" for this is to release a patch that is scheduled for release in a month or so from now. What, is patching out of cycle for a zero-day vuln suddenly against someones religion or something? That's about the only excuse that would seem somewhat sane (if you call organized religion sane) here.
If I were one of those paranoid type of guys, I would say that Adobe wrote this fucking thing themselves, and was paid to do it by all of the major computer hardware vendors in order to create a massive wave of "broken" computers just in time for holiday sales.
(Cue massive attack in 3...2...)
That could never happen, right?
Right?
Uh...right?
It's a freakin' document reader. How did Adobe end up here? Not only is it such a bloated piece of crap it takes forever to open a document, but they seem to have one vulnerability after another. The functionality that they added for 0.0000001% of their customers isn't really worth the price they're paying.
I guess all the good programmers left Adobe years ago.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
I and a bunch of others received emails today claiming to be from Adobe (it wasn't, as mail headers showed) that included an attachment, an .exe in a zip file.
Of course, you should never run attachments sent via email, even if the source appears trusted.
Hey I don't have a problem with you being on XP friend, if it works why fix it? I have windows 7 on one machine and XP on another, why bother switching the older XP machine?
My question would be why are you trying to run Adbobe reader at all when there is both Foxit and Sumatra on Ninite. Just check the box, click the download button and run it, that's it. then you can say goodbye to crappy Adobe Reader.
As for why Adobe can't build a secure reader? you answered it yourself friend when you said you thought it was " one program to do basically one simple enough thing" when to try to sell copies of Acrobat Adobe has been piling shit into that program for years. That is why frankly for production software like Acrobat i really wish they'd go to a yearly license model like AV companies use. that way instead of being pressured to constantly add new shit to the program so they have an excuse to upsell you they could just focus on making it better and more secure and get paid without having to add crap.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It has a 4.4 MB setup file, compared to Adobe Reader's 40.5 MB, for Windows 7. Installed size is 8.4 MB, whereas Adobe Reader requires 335 MB of available disk space.
Adobe PDF Reader - now with 10-40x the size of what's *really* needed! ***Bonus*** - Includes Critical 0 Day vulnerability, @ no extra charge!!!
What more could you ask for?
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
It is the default already (I checked using my copy of Adobe Reader X), which is part of why they are delaying the patch for this version until next month.
I wrote it years ago, but it's still quite relevant:
http://www.cert.org/blogs/certcc/2009/06/vulnerabilities_and_software_a.html
Coding quality and exploit mitigations aside, there's something to be said for the size of the software that you're installing. The more code that's there, the more there is to attack. If you're using Reader, you might ask, why is there a 3D rendering engine in my PDF reader? Or maybe even do something about it.
Why is it under Preferences | General instead of, I don't know, crazy idea, under Preferences | Security ?
And 4 weeks? They're leaving that hole open for 4 fscking weeks?
1- Announce a security flaw
2- Leave it open for a month
3- ???
4- Profit!
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Adobe PDF Reader - now with 10-40x the size of what's *really* needed! ***Bonus*** - Includes Critical 0 Day vulnerability, @ no extra charge!!!
What more could you ask for?
Ummm, could you maybe toss in an eternally running updater?
And if the same people could come up with a useless "download manager", well that would just be peachy!
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Preview works very well for reading, but Acrobat Pro is currently the best Mac solution for authoring PDFs. Unfortunately. But there you have it. Open a 5mb PDF in word. Edit. Save. Wow, look at that, did you notice, now it's 45mb? It seems that acrobat pro is one of the few editors that recompresses. Now watch the secretary fill out that PDF form in Word and try to email it back to you.
PDF - Portable Document Format. It does a good job at being universally supported, for reading anyway. Do you want that, or maybe something else proprietary like DOC? (or even better, DOCX) You may hate the reader but the format is very good. It's just insanely bloated with features that are neigh impossible to secure. (it's about as good an idea as when MS added auto running macros to their DOC and XLS spec) So you can count on there being a new exploit almost constantly, and as we're seeing here, a critical exploit every quarter or so.
I personally do as much as possible in RTF format. It's fairly well supported, and doesn't have security-undermining features in the standard. On the mac, the bundled TextEdit does a marvelous job with RTF, reads and authors in it, and has very similar functionality to PDF. I just wish clicking on an RTF document on a web page would display it inline instead of downloading the bloddy thing to the desktop.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
That is not actually true. Adobe Reader is a "conforming implementation" of the ISO 32000 PDF specification. As such, it must support features that your 8.4 MB reader cannot possibly see (such as the ability to pull from CRL's when encountering a digital signature). I used to work for Adobe and I am not here to defend them but in all fairness, you must distinguish the difference between conforming and non-conforming implementations of PDF before comparing.
Duane
> you must distinguish the difference between conforming and non-conforming implementations of PDF before comparing
Your point is valid, however, how much of that ISO standard is, itself, "ooooh, shiny"-ness which is one of the reasons why Reader has so many more possible places of failure? Before discovering better alternatives for reading PDFs under Windows, the first thing I would do to Adobe Reader was to disable scripting support inside PDF documents.
In other words, I prefer the non-conforming, because that means that (there is a chance that) the implementers might actually be ignoring stupid things which Adobe pushed into the PDF standard which shouldn't be there.
Evince isn't wonderful, even under Linux. When it opens a document it auto-sizes its window, (usually inappropriately), regardless of the window size it was last set to, which in my case is always 'maximized'. And it doesn't have tabs, (it seems that none of the Linux readers does), which is really a pain when you have 10 or more documents open at once, as I often do.
I've tried all or almost all of the PDF readers available for Linux, and I have yet to find one that I'd even call OK, much less good. I don't like Foxit as a company, and their product has suffered from some bloat as well over the past few years. But honestly, Foxit Reader is one of the things I miss about Windows, and I wish their Linux implementation wasn't a bad joke. If Foxit's Windows functionality was available for Linux, I'd use it and never look back. Heck, I'd even buy it - not very 'Linuxy' of me I know, but there you have it.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Don't forget the shell extension in windows, that enables those zero-day vulns to take effect by just hovering over the file! And unlike the updater and preloader, you can't turn this off without manually meddling with the registry.
ISO conformity is no excuse for the amount of vulnerabilities in Adobe Acrobat software. Unless the vulnerability is specified in the ISO.
"By default, Adobe Reader 10.0 enables Protected Mode"
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/860/cpsid_86063.html
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Good thing that this technology is not supported on the Linux version ;) .
It's the old Microsoft syndrome again...
Take software which was designed for a non networked, single user standalone environment...
Throw it onto a hostile network like the Internet...
Then make sure that 95% of systems run exactly the same software...
If there was a more even marketshare of PDF viewers out there, then they would be far less attractive to target.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Did that 4 years ago.
TBH, I've found that flash is hard to do without in some cases, so it is a good idea to have a CPU that supports condoms, so you can run flash in a condom. (condom == Virtual Machine)
Just keep a copy of the base image, and overwrite it whenever it gets too infected for use.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).