Well, our favorite bloated PDF viewer / reader Adobe Reader is once again victim to a fairly critical flaw that could allow a malicious user to gain control of your machine simply by your opening a PDF file using a vulnerable version of Adobe Reader.
I read about this latest vulnerability in an article by Ryan Naraine over at the ZDNet Zero Day security blog… the article is worthwhile but a bit misleading perhaps: this vulnerability affects multiple versions of Adobe Reader, but not Adobe Reader 9 which is the current version.
If you’re using Adobe Reader 8.1.2 or an older version, Adobe has a security patch available for this vulnerability officially identified by Adobe as APSB08-19. Once again, it does not affect Adobe Reader 9.
On a sidenote, the Adobe APSB08-19 patch is a 10.9MB download… (sigh)… to put this into perspective, the download size for the full program version of Foxit Reader 2.3 is just 2.55MB.
’nuff said.
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