Tag: adobe

Another Adobe Reader Security Problem

Adobe notifies the world of a buffer overflow problem affecting all Adobe Reader versions beginning with v7 and on all platforms. But hey, no worries — they’ll get around to fixing it in a few weeks,

Adobe is planning to release updates to Adobe Reader and Acrobat to resolve the relevant security issue. Adobe expects to make available an update for Adobe Reader 9 and Acrobat 9 by March 11th, 2009. Updates for Adobe Reader 8 and Acrobat 8 will follow soon after, with Adobe Reader 7 and Acrobat 7 updates to follow.

Ah, another notch in Adobe Reader’s stellar security history.

Adobe Reader Exploits in the Wild

It was such a shock to read recently about yet another exploit in Adobe’s piece-of-crap Reader. Ryan Nairaine over at ZDNet writes,

From the SANS ISC alert:

The payload is in a JavaScript object embedded in the PDF document. Once extracted, it just contains first level obfuscation with a simple eval(unescape()) call.

Once deobfuscated, parts of the publicly posted PoC are visible, but the attackers also modified certain parts.

Adobe Reader is one of the most widely distributed pieces of software on the Windows ecosystem to the application of this patch should be an absolute priority.

Forget patching Adobe Reader…just uninstall it and use FoxIt or any number of other PDF reader applications that don’t kill your system performance and aren’t constantly falling prey to these sort of problems (in part because they’re just not that big of a target given the install base…but still, Adobe has far too many of these problems with Adobe Reader).

Adobe Photoshop Elements Idiocy

So all I sit down with my laptop  so I can upload some photos to my FTP server. Ah, but I forgot that I had installed Adobe Photoshit Elements on the laptop. Adobe has configured the program to think I’m a moron, so as soon as I insert the SD card Elements’ “Photo Downloader” application hijacks my computer — god knows nobody ever was able to copy files from an SD card to a local drive without some bloated helper application.

And “Photo Downloader” is an A-1 piece of crap that a) causes my Explorer window to freeze (it appears to lock access to the SD card for itself), and b) promptly enters an unrecoverable state, forcing me to launch Windows Task Manager to kill it.

I hate developers who presume to hijack straightforward processes because they wrongly think they can do better.

Solution: Uninstall Photoshop Elements and run the CD through a shredder. Download and install GIMP.