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Zero Day

Ryan Naraine and Dancho Danchev

Adobe readies emergency fix for critical PDF Reader security hole

By | August 5, 2010, 11:44am PDT

Summary: This update will resolve critical security issues in Adobe Reader 9.3.3 for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX, Adobe Acrobat 9.3.3 for Windows and Macintosh, and Adobe Reader 8.2.3 and Acrobat 8.2.3 for Windows and Macintosh.

On the heels of a Black Hat conference presentation where researcher Charlie Miller (left) provided details of an exploitable vulnerability in Adobe’s PDF Reader software, the company plans to ship an out-of-band patch to ward off malicious hacker attacks.

Miller’s presentation did not include technical details of the flaw but attendees were able to piece together clues to determine that the flaw could lead to code execution attacks with rigged PDF files.

Adobe’s Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) was also able to confirm the issue and prepare an emergency patch that will be released for Adobe Reader and Acrobat during the week of August 16, 2010.

From Adobe’s pre-patch advisory:

This update will resolve critical security issues in Adobe Reader 9.3.3 for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX, Adobe Acrobat 9.3.3 for Windows and Macintosh, and Adobe Reader 8.2.3 and Acrobat 8.2.3 for Windows and Macintosh, including CVE-2010-2862 which was discussed at the Black Hat USA 2010 security conference on Wednesday, July 28, 2010.

Adobe said it was not aware of any exploits in the wild around any of the vulnerabilities that will be fixed in this out-of-band update.

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Ryan Naraine is a journalist and social media enthusiast specializing in Internet and computer security issues.

Disclosure

Ryan Naraine

The most important disclosure is of my employment with Kaspersky Lab as a security evangelist. Kaspersky Lab is a global company specializing in anti-malware and secure content management technologies. I do not own stocks or other investments in any technology company.

Biography

Ryan Naraine

Ryan Naraine is a journalist and social media enthusiast specializing in Internet and computer security issues. He is currently security evangelist at Kaspersky Lab, an anti-malware company with operations around the globe. He is taking a leadership role in developing the company's online community initiative around secure content management technologies.

Prior to joining Kaspersky Lab, Ryan was Editor-at-Large/Security at eWEEK, leading the magazine's and Web site's coverage of Internet and computer security issues and managing the popular SecurityWatch blog, covering the daily threats, vulnerabilities and IT security technologies. He also covered IT security, hacker attacks and secure content management topics for Jupiter Media's internetnetnews.com.

Ryan can be reached at naraine SHIFT 2 gmail.com. For daily updates on Ryan's activities, follow him on Twitter.

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