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Another security flaw in Adobe Reader – time to switch to another option?
April 29, 2009 | 10:46 am
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By Paul Biba
Here we go again. Adobe, according to the Washington Post, has confirmed that there is a security flaw in Reader for Windows, Linux and the Mac platforms. There have been a lot of security problems with Reader and perhaps we should be switching over to a more secure platform According to the Post’s Brian Krebs in his Security Fix column:
As an alternative, I generally recommend the free and lightweight Foxit Reader (like Adobe’s Reader it now comes bundled with a toolbar that you may want to opt out of installing). But there are other free PDF readers, including Sumatra PDF and PDF-XChange Viewer.
Thanks to Michael Pastore for the link. Michael also has a discussion of alternatives to Adobe Reader on his website. Luckily I’m on a Mac so I can use Preview, which cones with the Mac, and so don’t need to bother with this security-problem-plagued product.
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Comments:
Foxit is a fine piece of software and I use it when I need to use a Windows OS (90% of my time is spent in OS X). However, it is not immune to many of the same holes found in Acrobat. Foxit has had many security patches to respond to many of the same things threatening Acrobat.
My guess is that many of the pdf apps out there have some code/architecture similarity in order to support various pdf features and that will make some security issues common to many if not all of these apps – perhaps even Preview will be hit at some point.
Foxit is a fine piece of software and I use it when I need to use a Windows OS (90% of my time is spent in OS X). However, it is not immune to many of the same holes found in Acrobat. Foxit has had many security patches to respond to many of the same things threatening Acrobat.
My guess is that many of the pdf apps out there have some code/architecture similarity in order to support various pdf features and that will make some security issues common to many if not all of these apps – perhaps even Preview will be hit at some point.
Oops…forgot to say great post! Looking forward to your next one.
Well, Digital Editions uses completely different code than Acrobat Reader and is very, very unlikely to have similar security issues, and it reads PDF’s like a charm. DE launches fast, and such a pretty goth interface!