Adobe Reader X

Many of our customers make Adobe Reader part of their standard desktop image, or at least have it on the majority of their systems. Because of its ubiquity, Reader has become a major target for cybercriminals, with a scary increase in the number of exploited zero-day vulnerabilities over the last few years. When it’s Reader running on Windows that gets attacked (as it often is), our customers suffer.

 

Adobe has just released a major upgrade, Adobe Reader X, that should go a long way toward mitigating these attacks. Reader X incorporates a “Protected Mode” sandbox, not unlike the Protected Mode we implemented in Internet Explorer 7 and 8, in the Microsoft Office Isolated Conversion Environment (MOICE), and in Office 2010’s Protected View. Reader X’s Protected Mode should make it substantially harder to mount successful attacks against Windows computers via Adobe Reader. That’s good for our customers.

 

If you use Adobe Reader, you should begin evaluating Reader X right away.

 

This Adobe blog post announcing the release of Reader X includes links to additional information about its Protected Mode: https://blogs.adobe.com/asset/2010/11/adobe-reader-x-is-here.html

Comments

• Anonymous
  November 29, 2010
  Aaron, Your Adobe link redirects to Microsoft's OWA site. [Aaron Margosis]  Oops!  Fixed.  Thanks.

• Anonymous
  December 14, 2010
  If you are going to switch from the original reader anyway why not switch to Sumatra? Fill 90% of people's needs which is simply to view a pdf from the web. I am astonished that Adobe (and others) have not made more use of the low integrity process. It's been there for 5 years now.