According to a recent Tech-news-media-blits, Adobe has pushed out a highly critical security update to its Adobe Reader and Acrobat software. The update fixes a highly critical flaw in which code imbedded into a PDF file will be automatically executed.
I have never been a huge fan of Adobe Reader’s excessively long load times and browser instabilities. I have been a longtime user of Foxit Software’s Foxit Reader. Foxit Reader is a much smaller and lighter PDF reader but it does not support all of the latest functionality that is implemented in the newest versions by Adobe. Furthermore, it was also vulnerable to the same recent threats, although Foxit Software was much faster to respond to the threat.
Disclaimer: Foxit Reader is 3rd party software and although it is recommended by this consultant, it is not supported by OIT.
However, this is not the first time that Adobe has needed to fix it’s code, which is another reason to use Foxit Reader.
We recommend to all our users to upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Reader and/or Foxit Reader immediately.
But as of now there is no evidence that any malicious code or trojan has been written to take advantage of the security hole.
Details about the vulnerability and proof-of-concept videos can be found here for the inquiring minds.