Patch Adobe's PDF bug pronto, expert urges

As expected, Adobe patched a zero-day vulnerability in its popular Adobe Reader software Tuesday, marking the second time in three months that it delivered an update on the same day Microsoft issued its monthly fixes.

But while Microsoft's PowerPoint patch received lots of attention, the Adobe update should be at the top of people's to-do list, a security expert said today.

"Adobe's is more important than Microsoft's," said Wolfgang Kandek, chief technology officer at Qualys. "Even though Microsoft's had more visibility, if you have to choose between the two, you should patch Adobe. [Reader] is pretty much everywhere, attackers are increasing exploiting it and [PDF] is a widely-used corporate format."

The Reader vulnerability has been patched for all platforms in the free Reader 8 and 9, as well as in the corresponding versions of Adobe Acrobat, the for-pay PDF creation and editing application, the company said Tuesday.

Adobe's security advisory did not spell out the nature of the vulnerability, but earlier the company's security team had recommended that users disable JavaScript, indicating that the flaw was another bug in those applications' implementation of the scripting language.

Lack of detail is nothing new for Adobe's advisories; in March, when it patched another JavaScript bug in the same software, it also refused to provide anything more than general information because, while it had issued some updates, it had not managed to patch every version.

This week, Adobe updated Reader and Acrobat 9 to version 9.1.1, Reader and Acrobat 8 to version 8.1.5, and Reader and Acrobat 7 to version 7.1.2. But just as Microsoft did with its PowerPoint patch, Adobe stiffed Mac users. "Adobe expects to make available Adobe Reader 7 and Acrobat 7 updates for Macintosh before the end of June," the company said.

Adobe has staged updates in the past; in March the company said that waiting until all patches were ready for the February bug "just didn't make sense."

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