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The same hacker who discovered the recently patched Quicktime flaw in Firefox claims to have found an equally serious flaw in Adobe's PDF format.
Completely ignoring well known exclamation point rationing rules, Petkov recently raised the alarm on the GNUCitizen blog.“Adobe Acrobat/Reader PDF documents can be used to compromise yourWindows box. Completely!!! Invisibly and unwillingly!!!,” Petkov wrotein a recent blog posting. “All it takes is to open a PDF document orstumble across a page which embeds one.”
According to Petkov the exploit has been confirmed with Adobe Reader8.1 on Windows XP, though it’s possible other versions may be affectedas well. Since the flaw seems to involve the way files are read, thirdparty PDF apps, like Apple's Preview, could also be affected. Petkov says he has informed Adobe and will not release the code demonstrating the attack works until Adobe provides a patch.
Although Petkov’s claims are at this point unverified, we suggestusing caution when opening PDF files. Other Adobe PDF attacks have beendemonstrated in the past and, while most of them are not quite asserious as this exploit, it always pays to be careful when openingfiles from an unknown, untrusted source.