Adobe flaw leads to Trojan attack
Sunday, July 26th, 2009 2 viewsThis latest security breach in Adobe’s software may bring some red faces at the company, as the hole has been public since December 2008. Adobe is suffering from a two-fer of security flaws at present, with researchers revealing an attack which utilises both Acrobat Reader and Flash Player to infect targeted PCs with a Trojan horse. According to an article over on CNet , the vulnerability exists in Adobe Reader 9.1.2 and Adobe Flash Player 9 and 10 and has been around since at least December 2008 – although it’s only within the last two weeks that security researchers have evidence of it being exploited in the wild. The attack relies on the target opening a specially crafted SWF file, either as part of a web page or an e-mail, or opening a PDF file containing an embedded SWF. Once opened, the flaw is triggered and ‘dropper’ code executed which installs the malware – in the case of the current exploit, a Trojan horse package. Both Windows XP and Vista users are potentially at risk, but those using User Account Control in Vista will be protected from the Trojan being installed. For more protection, the US-CERT organisation suggests renaming the files authplay.dll and rt3d.dll from your Adobe Reader directory, or disabling Flash content entirely from within your browser.
