Critical fixes for Adobe Reader, Acrobat

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 17 February 2010 08:08

Business IT - Security

Adobe has delivered the promised updates to its Reader and Acrobat software, fixing a pair of critical security vulnerabilities.

Last week, Adobe released updates to Flash Player and AIR to protect against a critical vulnerability that could be exploited to make cross-domain requests.

Adobe warned that this issue extended to Reader and Acrobat, and advised that updates for Adobe Reader 9.3 for Windows, Macintosh and Unix, Adobe Acrobat 9.3 for Windows and Macintosh, and Adobe Reader 8.2 and Acrobat 8.2 for Windows and Macintosh would be released on February 16 (US time).

The company has delivered, and recommends users update to the 9.3.1 versions of Reader and Acrobat which also fix a second vulnerability that potentially allows the execution of arbitrary code.

Users of older versions of Windows or Mac OS X that can't run Reader 9 or Acrobat 9 are advised to update to the 8.2.1 versions.

An automatic update feature was recently added to Reader 9 and Acrobat 9, but as this runs to a predefined schedule users keen to adopt the new version may want to use the Check For Updates Now command in the Help menu. If multiple computers need updating, it may be more efficient to manually download and apply the updates.