Adobe has taken a significant step toward shoring up its popular Acrobat and Reader programs. The company today issued a patch to combat a zero-day vulnerability in its PDF software. eSecurity Planet has the details.
Adobe Systems on Tuesday released a patch for a critical PDF zero-day vulnerability that was causing computers running its ubiquitous Reader and Acrobat applications to shut down and, in some cases, be infiltrated by hackers.
The highly anticipated patch also includes a new update process that, once activated, will keep end users up to date in a much more streamlined and automated way, according to a posting on the Adobe Reader blog.
“This is the first time we’ve exercised the new updater with ‘official’ updates, which allows us to test a variety of network configurations encountered on the Internet in order to ensure a robust update experience,” Adobe project manager Steve Gottwals wrote in the post. “Over the next few weeks, we will be analyzing the test results and will continue communicating important details with you, including when we expect it to be active for all users, which could be as soon as our next update.”
Security software vendors and analysts had previously Adobe’s earlier update process was cumbersome and inefficient, often discouraging users to the point that they would simply not apply the new patches — leaving the applications open to abuse from hackers.
