Health & Fitness
PDF Reader Vulnerability Running Unchecked
An Adobe Reader vulnerability was announced on Dec. 7. The fix for this problem won't be released for a month.
Adobe has discovered a vulnerability in most versions of the popular free "Adobe Reader" software, as well as its commercial "Acrobat" product. This vulnerability is currently being used in targeted attacks, and will allow the attacker to take control of the affected computer. Worse yet, they have announced that the patch to fix this vulnerability won't be available until January 10th, 2012.
Other than the serious delay in patching the problem, there are a couple other interesting facts about this exploit that are disturbing. While it affects several versions of the free PDF Reader and paid-for Acrobat software, it is also cross platform. This means that this particular problem isn't confined to Windows computers. Both Mac and UNIX versions of the software are also vulnerable.
While you can enable a "protected view" mode to prevent this exploit, it may be time to seriously consider a new PDF reader. A quick look at Adobe's Security Bulletins reveals that these types of problems are far from rare.
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A couple of free PDF readers I recommend checking out are:
