IT News - Flaw Found in Adobe Acrobat

**Prodigy** · 06-07-05, 12:46

Flaw Found in Adobe Acrobat

Adobe has warned of a serious flaw affecting one of the most widely distributed client applications, Acrobat Reader. The flaw leaves users open to attack via maliciously crafted PDF files, which can be spread via e-mail attachments web page links, and can be used to take control of a system.

"Remote exploitation of a buffer overflow in Adobe Acrobat Reader for Unix could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code," says security firm IDefense, which discovered the flaw, in an advisory.

A number of bugs in Acrobat Reader have emerged in recent weeks, but none were particularly serious. The last serious flaw to affect Acrobat Reader was in December 2004, when Acrobat Reader 5.x and 6.x were hit by several vulnerabilities allowing remote attackers to execute malicious code.

Affected Versions

The flaw affects Acrobat Reader 5.x for Unix and Linux, which has a large installed base despite the availability of newer versions. PDF is widely used as a platform-independent file format, and unlike Microsoft Office document formats, has full support on Unix and Linux.

The bug is in the function UnixAppOpenFilePerform(), which is called by Acrobat Reader while opening certain documents, IDefense says. User-supplied data is copied into a fixed-sized stack buffer, which leads to a stack-based buffer overflow and the execution of arbitrary code, IDefense says. A remote attacker can easily choose data to exploit the hole without needing to know stack addresses, says the firm.

The bug is made somewhat less dangerous by the fact that two error messages appear before the exploit takes effect, but closing the message windows doesn't stop the attack from taking place, IDefense says.

IDefense and Adobe recommended caution when opening attachments or following links, and says users should upgrade to an unaffected version, such as Acrobat Reader 7.0.

**Ehsan Z.** · 06-07-05, 18:45

While we are talking about Acrobat Reader, i think its good to know alternative programs to Acrobat Reader. One of the main porpuse of using Acrobat Reader is viewing PDF documents, Personally i find Adobe Acrobat very annoying, slow and resources hungry program. if you want to view one single document (whether open it from your computer or web page) you have to wait about couple of minutes for Acrobat Reader to finish loading and showing annoying Welcome Screen

I want to intorduce you an alternative program to Acrobat Reader
which has no annoying Welcome screen and slow loading time

Foxit PDF Reader is one of the alternatives

Foxit PDF Reader is a free reader for PDF (eBook) documents. You can view and print PDF documents with it.

Advantages:

Foxit PDF Reader is small (the download size less than 1MB), so you can download it quickly. It doesn't need any lengthy installation, so you can start to run it as soon as you can download it.
And it starts up immediately, so you don't need to wait the annoying "Welcome" screen to disappear.
Foxit PDF Reader is extremely easy to use, just double click it to start and then click open button to open your PDF document. If you want to print, click on "Print" button. If you want to setup the page layout for printing, select "Print Setup" from "File" menu.
Foxit PDF Reader runs on Windows 95/98/NT/2000/XP/2003. It is provided by Foxit Software Company for free non-commercial use. This product is provided AS IS without any explicit or implicit warranty. Please see the End User License Agreement.

Download Fox Reader

Click Here

Editor Note:
Please note that of course Fox PDF Reader has not all abalities of Adobe Acrobat Reader yet but if you are using Acrobat Reader Just for viewing and reading PDF documents just like how I do, its better to use this small program rather than slow and annoying program like Acrobat Reader