Mikko Hypponen from respected security company F-Secure at this year’s RSA security conference in San Francisco, the #1 conference for security professionals, has advised users to stop using Adobe Reader because of the number of exploits targeted at it.
Of the targeted attacks so far this year, more than 47 % exploited holes in Acrobat Reader while six vulnerabilities have been discovered that target the program itself. Scary stuff.
I was invited to a presentation last year in London on the River Thames hosted by F-Secure, where Mikko said exactly the same thing, that hackers had moved on from attacking Windows and Internet Explorer because they were fairly secure, and were now going after and attacking individual applications and brower addons instead, which weren’t as secure as the main application.
Mikko said that it was harder than ever for F-Secure to keep up with the hackers, and in San Francisco he asked for companies like Adobe to do more and to learn from Microsoft’s example and patch identifided vulnerabilities quicker.
If you’re looking for a safer way to read PDF files, then Mikko recommends pdfreaders.org for a list of alternatives.
More: Cnet
