But contrary to the text that accompanies the update, it does not disable all JavaScript, the scripting language that hackers have frequently used to exploit Adobe Reader vulnerabilities. Microsoft and Symantec have also noted a surge in exploits tucked into PDF documents.įoxit 3.3's Trust Manager is switched on by default, said Eugene Xiong, the president of Foxit Software.

According to recent tallies by antivirus vendor McAfee, PDF exploits were up more than eight-fold in 2009 compared to the year before, a trend that has continued thus far into 2010. However, Brad Arkin, Adobe's head of security and privacy, has acknowledged that one possible solution would be to disable /Launch currently, it's turned on by default. The attacks last week that exploited the /Launch flaw peaked on Friday, April 28, and have since dropped to nearly nothing, researchers at IBM Internet Security Systems' X-Force team said yesterday.įoxit is alone in addressing the /Launch problem: Adobe has declined to answer questions on whether in-the-wild use of the function would prompt the company to update Reader and Acrobat.

He also reported he had figured out how to change Adobe Reader's warning to enhance the scam. That flaw in the PDF specification's '/Launch' function was disclosed in late March by Belgium security researcher Didier Stevens, who demonstrated how he could abuse the feature to run malware embedded in a PDF document. Last week, several security companies warned of a major malware campaign that tried to dupe users into opening rigged PDFs that exploited an unpatched design flaw in the PDF format, one attackers could use to infect users of Adobe's and Foxit's software.

Foxit reader update problems