Privacy, Security & Virus Information

Is Nothing Sacred? Hackers Attack Adobe's Reader and Acrobat Software

An Adobe post has confirmed that the company fears that both their Adobe Acrobat and Reader are currently under active attack from a Trojan named Pidief.H. Adobe has hastened to point out that infection rates are "extremely limited" and the company's risk assessment level is very low, suggesting that the threat has been largely contained.

The fact that hackers can succeed in breaching the defences of a company holding such an elevated status in the software industry has raised a few eyebrows; the attack seemingly was targeted on a zero-day level, a combination which is hard to defend against. These forms of targeted attacks against a specific company's software invariably come in a personalised form, and usually through an e-mail. The e-mail has to be good to evade all the security blockages and anti-virus programs that most computer owners and operators should have in place, but reports are that there are many cases where it has slipped through.

When some poor unsuspecting soul, who is lulled into a false sense of security, mistakenly opens an e-mail attachment that sets off a zero-day attack, the virus is almost guaranteed to find the weak spot in the software that it has been primed to attack, as long as that software has been installed on the computer, and Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat reader are resident in millions of computers around the globe. The only real protection against the Pidief.H Trojan is to have an anti-virus program strong enough to detect the attack. Some of the less sophisticated anti-virus software suites will have very low capability of defending against these types of small scale targeted attacks.

Thankfully, in these days of mass-produced viruses, the targeted attacks are few and far between, but can be devastatingly vicious if they get through a computer's defences.

Apparently Adobe learned of the attack on Monday of this week, with three of the leading anti-virus software developers advising of the attack within minutes, and McAfee being one of them, while the majority of anti-virus products are yet to detect the attack which apparently has been active since Friday 11th December.

Until the spread of Pidief.H Trojan can be arrested it is expected to become more wide spread in the next few weeks, especially to those whose computers are not sufficiently protected against such sophisticated attacks.

 
< Back