Critical Vulnerability in Adobe Reader and Acrobat

Opening PDFs is often just a double-click away, especially in prepress or ad-intake where your job involves receiving PDF, and other file types, throughout the entire day. Markzware keeps on eye on PDF news, since FlightCheck, preflight software from Markzware, can check many file types for print quality assurance, including for PDF workflows.

Here is an Adobe Acrobat back-door, whereby hackers have taken advantage to make a malicious PDF. Click on the source link to learn how to turn off JavaScript, or just be careful and remember to use FlightCheck to preflight during prepress:

“Details of the vulnerability? A malicious PDF could cause the affected application to crash and could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the computer. I know that’s what we always say, but in this case, there are reports of this vulnerability being exploited in the wild, at least in the Windows world.

Luckily, the security group Shadowserver has verified the exploit with Adobe Reader 8 and 9 on Windows. Their posting explains that the vulnerability relies in part on JavaScript, such that turning off JavaScript is an easy way to mitigate the problem. In their testing, a malicious PDF could still crash Adobe Reader if JavaScript was turned off, but it couldn’t take over the machine.” Source

FlightCheck, preflight software by Markzware, can preflight many file types during prepress to ensure print quality control. FlightCheck is available online at the FlightCheck Store and can preflight prepress documents in PDF workflows and more for quality print output.

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