Adobe to Patch Critical Vulnerabilities in Reader, Acrobat This Week

Last week, security researchers from FireEye identified a PDF zero-day that was being used in targeted attacks. Shortly after, Adobe confirmed the existence of two critical vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader and Acrobat XI for Windows and Macintosh that were being exploited in active attacks.

On Saturday, Feb. 16, Adobe said that a patch is scheduled to be released this week to resolve the two vulnerabilities, CVE-2013-0640 and CVE-2013-0641.

The exploits were seen in extremely targeted attacks against high profile targets, and were sophisticated effort that appear to be the first to successfully escape Adobe’s “protected mode” sandbox.

“Adobe plans to make available updates for Adobe Reader and Acrobat XI (11.0.01 and earlier) for Windows and Macintosh, X (10.1.5 and earlier) for Windows and Macintosh, 9.5.3 and earlier 9.x versions for Windows and Macintosh, and Adobe Reader 9.5.3 and earlier 9.x versions for Linux during the week of February 18, 2013,” the software maker wrote in an updated security advisory. 

Following the discovery of the targeted attacks by FireEye, the C&C server connected to this particular campaign has gone offline. The command and control server was hard-coded (fixed) in the malware used, and was hosted at a European web hosting provider before being taken offline.

Enterprise administrators can protect Windows users across their organization by enabling Protected View in the registry and propagating that setting via GPO or any other method, Adobe said. More information on mitigation via protected view can be found here.