Many agree Adobe has never responded to security vulnerabilities in their popular products quickly. Known vulnerabilities would take weeks and in some cases months before being addressed. Most recently in February Adobe confirmed a known vulnerability in their Acrobat PDF software and admitted the vulnerability is actively being used by hackers. Brad Arkin, Adobe’s director for product security and privacy mentions this event is what prompted a new security practice.

Adobe has started reviewing the code in Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat products and is identifying “at-risk areas” that will be addressed and ultimately re-written. “We’re going to broadly look at the whole application, but focus on at-risk areas, where we’ll do threat modeling, static code analysis and look for potential vulnerabilities,” said Arkin. “We’re going to do a lot more pro-active work,” he promised. “We want to shake loose vulnerabilities.”

Arkin promises a regular patching cycle and in fact will deliver patches the same day as Microsoft. Although their patch cycle is quarterly, not monthly, the patches will be delivered the second Tuesday of the month. This schedule has not officially started.  Arkin also mentioned JavaScript will not be disabled by default in future builds of Adobe Acrobat products.

More information on Adobe Acrobat’s new security initiative can be found on Adobe’s Asset blog.

Tags: acrobat, Adobe, microsoft, Patch, PDF, Security, Vulnerability, zero day

Author: Christopher

One of the quickest and easiest ways to tell if you are infected with Conficker virus is to look below and see if any of the images from four of the 100+ security sites blocked by Conficker do not load.  I put four images for the following security websites: Kaspersky Lab, F-Secure, Secureworks, and Trend Micro below. If you have any problems loading these images or visiting the sites listed, you may be infected with the Conficker virus. If you are using a proxy server you will likely still be able to load the images and this is not a good test.

If you believe you are infected with Conficker (Kido/Downadup) check out Kaspersky’s KKiller tool to remove it.

Images are trademarks of their respective owners.

Tags: Conficker, conficker removal, Downadup, Kido, Malware, MS08-067, MS08-068, MS09-001, remove conficker, Security, virus

Author: Christopher