CIOs and IT managers care a very great deal about keeping the computer systems on their networks free of viruses. Most don’t concern themselves with the details of antivirus strategy. Very understandably, they prefer to leave the inner-workings of virus-scanning to the software vendors. No one wants to second-guess their vendor. But maybe you should. […]
View PostAV vendors once again claim to be “surprised” by an attack vector they should have expected. A new complaint is running rife in the antivirus community, this time about PDF and Adobe Reader, the new frontier for viruses, worms and other cyber creepy-crawlies. Let’s unpack a paragraph from the Avast! blog post: Another nasty trick […]
View PostPerhaps the single most common myth about PDF files is the idea that they are “unchangeable”. WRONG. It’s the single most common misunderstanding about the most common of file-formats. In reality, PDF files are easy to change. They are also easy to annotate with comments, encrypt, digitally sign, make interactive, communicate with servers and much […]
View PostRecent news accounts have highlighted some security vulnerabilities in current releases of Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader, with the latest such vulnerability to be addressed (Adobe says) in an update due out January 12. Very little public information out there offers readers a useful sense of the risks and how to mitigate them. The common […]
View PostLast week, loud noises began emanating from a variety of online security experts regarding a vulnerability in Adobe’s Reader browser plugin that can allow malicious code to execute on a user’s system via cross-site-scripting (XSS). The headlines were choice: “Adobe bug may be worst flaw of 2007”, and “Adobe Flaw Means Trusted PDFs May Be […]
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