Adobe Reader Trojan predates mystery update by two weeks

Security researchers have confirmed that a flaw fixed by a recent "covert" update to Adobe Reader has been exploited to distribute Trojans for at least a fortnight prior to its publication last Thursday (7 February). Adobe confirmed that version 8.1.2 of Adobe Reader fixes a number of critical flaws that might be remotely …

[Anonymous Coward]

pishhh

Use Foxit Reader, allot better than the Adobe bloatware

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Acrobat 5 vulnerable?

'Cos that's what I find appropriate, due to lack of bloatware. It occasionally warns "this file may container newer shinier stuff than your Acrobat can read" (paraphrased) but so far everything I've read has worked just fine.

[Hate2Register]

Woo, I'm scared. No really..

Hope I don't catch it. Sounds naasty.

[Alex Eckelberry]

No, version 5 shouldn't be affected

AFAIK only 7 and 8 are affected.

[RW]

And even Acrobat 5 can be de-bloated

Find out where it's hiding and start stripping out the dll's one by one. It's amazing how few of them are needed to read PDFs -- and how fast Acrobat loads once it's been leaned down.

I suppose you lose some function, but I've never noticed anything.

Paris, because she's so skinny and lean.

[Anonymous Coward]

Followup needed

Anyway, what happened to that mystery website exploit mentioned a few weeks back?

[James Pearson]

@anon

Foxit ftw. It has constantly amazed people when I open pdfs fast. Though, of course now I'm using KPDF, but that's a different story.

[John]

Defending Adobe Reader

OK, so "reading PDFs" is easily done by lots of other software that's a lot leaner. But I work in publishing and there are lots of features of the PDF format that are only supported properly (or at all) by Adobe Reader, such as layers, scripting and animations. Now, these aren't necessary in many applications (a software manual is a software manual, and a form is a form) but they are extremely useful in many others. A lot of our new publishing for schools is taking advantage of these features of later PDF versions - and hence of Adobe Reader.

Adobe Reader isn't just a "PDF rasteriser", as many other programs are. It's a full PDF engine. Yes, it's big but that's because it's powerful.

(It may be bloated as well, I couldn't comment on that. But it's not all bloat by any means.)

[Richard Gadsden]

Acrobat Reader

Other annoying defences of Acrobat Reader:

It has an API, which means it's extensible. Lots of others aren't extensible. If there is one extension you need, then you're stuck with Acrobat Reader.