The Adobe PDF file is a standard method of information
delivery in the business world. Presentations, whitepapers, sales literature,
promotional materials and everything in between rely on PDFs to ensure clean,
professional and universally readable transmissions of information. So, this
past Monday’s announcement that Adobe’s Acrobat and PDF reader software are
both being exploited by malicious programming came as an important advisory to
businesses worldwide.
The Washington Post’s Brian
Krebs reports on the story in his Security Fix blog. Adobe
Systems Inc. recently confirmed a report issued by the not-for-profit Shadowserver Foundation, a group that monitors the movements of malicious Internet
activity. The security exploits are currently known to affect the most recent
versions of both Adobe programs (9.x and 8.x), and there are no fixes or patches
available at this time. Only five of the 41 commonly available anti-virus
software packages detect this exploit accurately.
Both reports suggest disabling JavaScript within Acrobat and
staying up-to-date with the issue via Adobe announcements and trustworthy tech
blogs. Businesses that use these Adobe products should be especially aware of
any suspicious or possibly fraudulent activity until the issue is resolved.