In a brief blog post, Adobe's security team has said that it is investigating reports of a brand new zero-day vulnerability affecting its Adobe Reader and Acrobat XI (11.0.1) products.
The concern is related to a blog post by security firm Fireeye who yesterday claimed to have uncovered a PDF zero-day vulnerability being exploited in the wild to infect computers.
Unfortunately, details in Fireeye's blog post are scant - and so it's currently impossible for SophosLabs to confirm if this is a genuine zero-day threat.
Nevertheless it would be sensible for all computer users to be extremely cautious about opening unsolicited PDF files. In fact, that's good advice all year around - not just when there are rumours of a new unpatched vulnerability in Adobe's software.
SophosLabs continues to monitor the situation, and will update protection for Sophos users as appropriate.
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PDF image from Shutterstock.
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Adobe have now published a security advisory with advice on mitigating this flaw. Unfortunately the mitigation is only available to Adobe Reader 11 (XI) and Acrobat 11 (XI) users since it makes use of the new Protected View.
Full details are available in the security advisory:
http://www.adobe.com/support/security/advisories/apsa13-02.html
Thank you.
If you don't have version 11 of Adobe Reader or Acrobat installed, the workaround provided is not ideal.
If you have Google Chrome installed on your computer you can use it to view PDFs (not sure if this also works for Mac OS X). Details of this workaround are available at the following link:
http://www.h-online.com/security/news/item/Adobe-...
Thanks.
So true about always being cautious when opening a PDF file. It seems that rumors get circulated every so often and then everyone is afraid to open anything. Thing is to just be cautious all the time with viewing things. I have had great success using a PDF Reader from http://www.foxitsoftware.com/ and have never had any fear or problems.