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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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
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.
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!
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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.
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.