Adobe patches critical PDF hole

URI bug rears its ugly head again.

By Gregg Keizer, Computerworld
Published: 03:28 GMT, 23 October 07

Adobe has issued patches for its software to prevent Windows XP users being hacked by malicious PDF files.

The patches were included in updates to Reader, the for-free PDF rendering utility, and Acrobat, Adobe's full-featured application; both now in Version 8.1.1.

"Critical vulnerabilities have been identified in Adobe Reader and Acrobat that could allow an attacker who successfully exploits these vulnerabilities to take control of the affected system," Adobe warned. "A malicious file must be loaded in Adobe Reader or Acrobat by the end-user for an attacker to exploit these vulnerabilities."

Only users of Windows XP who have Internet Explorer 7 installed are at risk, Adobe added.

The patches come over two weeks after Adobe acknowledged the bug and posted a complicated work-around that required users to edit the Windows registry.

Adobe is the most recent company to patch its software against a Windows-wide vulnerability that Microsoft has owned up to but has yet to fix. On 10 October, Microsoft's security team admitted that Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 mishandled some Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) and promised to provide a fix in the future.

But Microsoft said third-party developers have to shoulder some responsibility. "While our update will help protect all applications from malformed URIs, application vendors that handle URIs can also do stricter validation themselves to prevent malicious URIs from being passed to ShellExecute()," said Jonathan Ness, a program manager at the Microsoft Security Response Center, nearly two weeks ago.

Other vendors that have updated their software include Mozilla and Skype, who patched Firefox and the Skype VoIP software, respectively, back in July.

The PDF vulnerability was disclosed in September by UK researcher Petko Petkov, who said that attackers could compromise a PC simply by persuading users to open a PDF document or view a web page with embedded PDF content.

Links to the Adobe Reader 8.1.1 and Acrobat 8.1.1 updates are available in today's security bulletin.

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mark brown | Published: 23:29 GMT, 25 October 2007

why do web sites tell us to download a particular fix or whatever and do not tell me where to find it? i am disabled and have brain damage

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