Adobe Acrobat vulnerablity still in wild

A vulnerability has been discovered in Adobe System's Acrobat Reader by the programmer who discovered a zero-day flaw in Apple's QuickTime two weeks ago and a critical bug in Microsoft's Windows Media Player last week. "The issues were verified on Windows XP SP2 with the latest Adobe Reader 8.1, although previous versions are also affected," Petko Petkov wrote on his blog. He advises caution opening PDFs until the vulnerability is patched.

In the QuickTime and Windows Media Player cases, Petkov posted proof-of-concept exploit code. But not this time. He explained why he refused to publish code to prove that the PDF vulnerability is real: "The issue is quite critical given the fact that PDF documents are in the core of today's modern business," Petkov wrote. "This and the fact that it may take a while for Adobe to fix their closed source product are the reasons why I am not going to publish any POCs [proof-of-concepts]. You have to take my word for it. The POCs will be released when an update is available."