PDF Exploits On the Rise 183
An anonymous reader writes "According to the TrustedSource Blog, malware authors increasingly target PDF files as an infection vector. Keep your browser plugins updated. From the article: 'The Portable Document Format (PDF) is one of the file formats of choice commonly used in today's enterprises, since it's widely deployed across different operating systems. But on a down-side this format has also known vulnerabilites which are exploited in the wild. Secure Computing's Anti-Malware Research Labs spotted a new and yet unknown exploit toolkit which exclusively targets Adobe's PDF format.'"
Not to worry. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure Secure Computing has a product for that. :-/
Re:Not to worry. (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't set your browser to auto-load PDF files. (Or any other file for that matter.) Download it first; scan it; then open it externally.
Re:Not to worry. (Score:5, Insightful)
Or don't use Adobe Reader, instead use one of the many competent and more secure open alternatives.
Re: (Score:2)
I was wondering whether there was any hope of getting websites to start saying "requires a PDF reader" instead of "requires Adobe's PDF reader". The non-Adobe readers I've used have pretty much all rendered docs fine and twice as quickly to boot.
Re:Not to worry. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is only going to happen after this kind of thing is called an "Acrobat Reader exploit" rather than a "PDF exploit" though.
Re: (Score:2)
I was wondering whether there was any hope of getting websites to start saying "requires a PDF reader" instead of "requires Adobe's PDF reader".
This is only going to happen after this kind of thing is called an "Acrobat Reader exploit" rather than a "PDF exploit" though.
Yeah sure. You expect to hear that things are called a "Windows exploit" rather than "Web exploit," too?
Recommendations (Score:2)
Since Adobe Reader has such a bad rep, can anyone recommend a good free alternative for my windows box at work?
Re: (Score:2)
"Since Adobe Reader has such a bad rep, can anyone recommend a good free alternative for my windows box at work?"
Yes. Ubuntu Linux is a great alternative to Windows.
Oh, you meant an alternative to Adobe Reader?
My personal favorite is pdf995, but it's not open and might be too much for you (if you just want to VIEW pdfs). If you want a JUST VIEWER (or if openness is important to you) you should probably go with xpdf. It's simple and fast although not the flashiest piece of software out there.
Re: (Score:2)
Or never ever use PDF since they are bloated pieces of shit. I have no idea why this fileformat is still clinging to life. They could easily all be replaced by png files or rft the only differences would be the files would be smaller load in 1/10 the time and you wouldnt need another useless bloated product to load them.
Re:Not to worry. (Score:5, Informative)
I've been using Foxit exclusively for some time now.
There's nothing about Adobe Reader that I miss. Foxit seems to handle everything I come across just fine. And it's way faster and never crashes. Adobe Reader seemed to crash on me all the time on multiple machines.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, but there was already a buffer overflow security fix a little while back. I am using Foxit too because I finally got sick of Adobe when they wanted to install some Flex or god awful runtime and phone home constantly. Adobe has gotten stupid.
Time for a "Firefoxpdf" kind of thing. Foxit is it for me. Hope it doesn't have any more buffer overflows, but I bet it does.
Re: (Score:2)
Could that be due to the 3MB download versus the 300MB download? Have you seen the latest reader suite? It's ungodly.
But yeah, I've been having my office users use Foxit more and more. Most love it, except for the one holdout that swears we should open all PDFs in Acrobat 5 so we can edit them, just in case we need to edit them. My response? Open Acrobat 5, File, Open, find PDF, Edit, Save.
I mean, really...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The rendering quality of Foxit is sub-par, try SumatraPDF which is open-source. The visual quality is much better.
Re: (Score:3)
I think Adobe calls shutdown.exe on windows for a reboot. Usually I say reboot later and use the thing right away. Most times I do not need to reboot. Sometimes (lastest version) it complains that I need to reboot in order to use the software.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Kpdf/Okular is great if you're running KDE as your desktop. With kde4, I think okular will eventually be available for windows as well. (I'm not sure on that...) The main advantage is that it's very quick to load and tightly integrated with Kdesktop. If you don't use kde, it has fewer advantages over the others.
You can annotate and review pdfs in okular just like you do in acroread. It doesn't have editing capability, but neither do the free versions of almost anything else, to my knowledge. (PDFedit
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Evince works flawlessly for me.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And missing features.
Like script execution turned on by default.
Nothing could go wrong there.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Foxit [foxitsoftware.com] FTW.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
oh, you mean the inability to start up in less than a minute? or the ability to act as a virus vector?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I use kpdf, and it works great for almost all PDFs. The only problem I have with it is PDFs that have fillable forms; I haven't found an open-source PDF viewer that can do that yet, so I usually use Adobe Reader or some German-made closed-source program whose name escapes me at the moment (I believe it starts with "C").
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
okular is supposed to support fillable forms. :)
haven't yet had a chance to test that, still using kde3
Re: (Score:2)
Not only does evince not have "KNOWN security vulnerabilities as of the date of this posting", it was already fixed at the time Secunia reported it in 2006:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=383485 [gnome.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I learned that the hard way. Computer was infected with that annoying Windows 2008 Antivirus with a PDF launching in a browser.
Re: (Score:2)
Time for PDF Lite? (Score:5, Interesting)
Most PDF files have nothing more than text, vector graphics, and images in "read-only" formats. They don't have fill-in-the-blank fields or load-a-codec-and-play-a-video, or active content.
Web browsers need a "simple PDF" plugin that will activate on PDFs. If the "simple PDF" plugin loads a file with content it can't display, it will display what it can and give the user an opportunity to load the file in a full-fledged PDF plugin or external viewer.
Re: (Score:2)
That's because of quartz library, which is Mac OS X's pdf based graphics rendering subsystem.
It's great because it'll show pdfs directly in Mail app as an inline attachment. (no need to open it!).
So can Mac Firefox (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
The problem with any sort of OCR is it will introduce errors.
For your example of a 20 page document, it could be feasible to manually proofread the OCR text.
For a large document, especially one with a poor quality source, unless it's something frightfully important it is not worth the effort to manually proof the OCR and then redo all the layout and formatting to bring it to a different media format (i.e. dead tree -> html). As long as the scan is of sufficient quality to leave anything questionable huma
Re: (Score:2)
PDF is basically a newer version of Postscript, and it's quite efficient. For datasheets that are scanned pages, there's really no good solution there; either you have to save them as an image format, or PDF (which internally stores them as an image format). But for new documents, PDF works quite well, since it is text-based.
HTML really sucks, IMO. If you're trying to make something that looks like a printed page, with images and such, you're better off with PDF. HTML can look totally different based on
Re: (Score:2)
It certainly wouldn't be the first example of a format which contains "features" (which may or may not be documented) which are virtually exclusivly used maliciously.
What people really want is an easy way to share formatted documents.
Often along the lines of "it would look like this if printed". Something which sending the likes of
Re: (Score:2)
Funny that you should claim EEE, when Adobe not only created PDF, but are the maintainers of the format.
Or as teh hackers will call it (Score:2)
Portable Virus Format, PVF
Security article (Score:2)
Why do all these security articles end up basically saying the same thing?
Patch & update, rinse, repeat.
Everything else in these security/warning articles just show you what happens to the people who never patch anything and open anything & everything.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
PDF exploit? Or Adobe Reader exploit? (Score:2, Insightful)
What if you use a PDF reader that's not made by Adobe?
Re:PDF exploit? Or Adobe Reader exploit? (Score:5, Funny)
What if you use a PDF reader that's not made by Adobe?
You download the virus using flash.
I wonder why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmmm. Maybe this is because they've crammed all kinds of interactive content into a Portable Document Format?
I mean seriously. I thought the idea of PDFs was "this is as simple as a printed copy, and looks the same."
Re: (Score:2)
Wouldn't that describe PostScript better? And even Microsoft's XPS! PDF was pretty much always doing too much IMO... but its what caught on, meh. The features it provides are very very useful. Just not so useful in non-trusted environments.
Re:I wonder why? (Score:4, Informative)
Postscript can contain function calls and as such, is often marked as a potential scripting threat. Google, for example, refuses to send raw eps files as attachments.
A similar principle to Windows MetaFile, which is essentially a list of calls to the Windows graphics library ; several Windows exploits owe their birth to WMF calling unchecked functions in the graphics library.
Note that just because a file format doesn't contain function calls or scripting does not make it secure. A poor implementation of any file reader can be vulnerable to a well crafted file. But active content makes things much easier, because it's much harder to check for security.
Sumatra PDF Reader (Score:5, Informative)
Use the Sumatra PDF Reader. It is a very lightweight reader. Since it doesn't have all the other useless bloat crap that Adobe's reader has, I'm sure it is a lot less vulnerable. It is also open source, so you don't have to rely on downloading an even more bloated version of Acrobat Reader to fix the exploits.
http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/
I have this installed on all of the PCs here at the office. It has eliminated just about all of the issues i had with the adobe crapware.
Postscript (Score:2)
PDF is essentially a compressed, higher ability Postscript, right? Postscript is a language, and that therefore would be how malware writers exploit it--they exploit bugs in the readers, which are essentially compilers--to compromise a system.
Re:Postscript (Score:5, Informative)
On the contrary, PDF is (originally) a subset of PS plus the ability to embed fonts into the document, apply some overall compression where sensible, and stitch everything together into one carrier.
And while it is true that the past knows about "PS bombs" which e.g. will render your printer useless cause its interpreter is stuck in a loop (after all, PS is a Turing-capable programming language opening all sorts of fun if your idea of fun are stack-oriented languages), the problem with current PDF exploits comes from the fact that this format gets increasingly overloaded.
I can see why one would love to see Javascript and embedding all kinds of multimedia stuff within PDF. Would bring PDF on par with Powerpoint with respect to animations etc. -- which wouldn't be the worst thing for me, cause I love doing slides with PDFtex and beamer, and Adobe of course would like to present their format as a vital alternative to those nasty office formats.
But it also adds complexity. Instead of a simple postscript renderer you end up with a gazillion of helper libraries, bringing in their very own bugs.
Re: (Score:2)
You can turn of Javascript for Acrobat Reader so that could be a temporary fix (or permanent depending on security prefs).
Re: (Score:2)
PDF is a parametric page description format similar to (although nothing like) HTML... it's only Turing complete when it includes Javascript (although the percentage of pdfs created with embedded javascript are very small, certainly <1%)
If anything, this means Javascript should be a separate OS library that the user can configure separately (and use different interpreters/en
New PDFs in my inbox... (Score:4, Interesting)
Interestingly enough, I have gotten 3 PDFs in the past few days in my corporate email inviting me to various "seminars" on technology subjects. All were very well written and professional looking but for products I have never used and companies I had not heard of. They passed both my email server's scanning and the local virus scan on my company laptop, however since I have very rarely gotten PDFs in the past I am now very suspicious.
Jonah HEX
Re:New PDFs in my inbox... (Score:5, Funny)
I have a link to a white paper on how to tell if a PDF is a security threat. I can share it if you like. PDF format of course.
Logical Step for Exploits (Score:3, Insightful)
There is now Mac OS, various Linux distros, etc. There is FireFox, Opera, Chrome, etc. There is Open Office, etc. Maybe Adobe needs some good competition in the eyes of the public?
Re: (Score:2)
> Exploit the Windows operating system cause the majority of users have it.
> Exploit Internet Explorer because the majority of users have it.
> Exploit Office products because the majority of users have it.
> Exploit Adobe's PDF format because the majority of users have it.
Fortunately, you seem to be right. Remember back around 1998, when ActiveState Perl installed itself as a CLIENT-SIDE BROWSER SCRIPTING LANGUAGE for Internet Explorer, sitting alongside VBscript and JScript... but no real limits
Re: (Score:2)
just about anything you COULD do with Perl, which was "basically everything"
$#/%% ^!&**//!\\|!($$
There, just wiped your harddrive
SCAM Research Labs? (Score:4, Funny)
Wait, we're supposed to trust the findings from SCAM Research Labs?
Personally, I'm waiting to get a job at Secure Computing's Over-The-Counter Hardware Research Lab.
Update (Score:5, Interesting)
When I used to use Windows, I found Acrobat to be the most intrusive software ever because of its auto-update. Pretty much every time you try to open a document it's in your face demanding you allow it to update itself and then it often requests a reboot (a reboot? For a PDF viewer??)
This seemed to happen every other week, even if appeased it by letting it do its thing. I suspect this update would be one possible attack vector.
Yet another case in which a "fuck off" key would be a useful addition to the Windows keyboard.
non-FOSS feature proposal (Score:4, Funny)
Although I usually decry any MS Windows-only feature proposal for not supporting Linux, I feel it is appropriate in this case.
Re: (Score:2)
Other use cases where a "fuck off" key would be useful:
- You are trying to download a file: cancel/allow (defaults to allow)
- Millions of overlapping windows and popups (defaults to return to desktop)
- This application has shat itself. Would you like to file a bug report (that will probably crash as well.) (Defaults to "no thanks")
and of course the number 1 case:
- You seem to be trying to type a letter, would you like some help with that? (defaults to hunting down the clippy developer and stabbing them with
Re: (Score:2)
Since a keyboard is a piece of hardware, and 'Windows' is a piece of sh.. ahem.. software, I don't think there should be any relationship at all.
If Windows needs a 'fuck off' function, it would best be implemented in software. Of course the simplest way is just deleting it in its entirety, of course, and I'd rather not have remnants of it left in hardware.
Re: (Score:2)
If you don't run as Administrator, none of that stuff shows up.
Overuse of PDF (Score:4, Insightful)
The only reason to ever use PDF is if it is NECESSARY for your audience to print the document in question.
Way too often websites have PDFs that are the only alternative for information. If you want to look up a train time for example, once and once only, you almost always have to download a PDF -- why? Sure, give people the choice of doing that if they want to, but there's no reason to slow down the internet for one-off pieces of information.
With concerns about the environment (perceived real or theatrical, regardless), you'd think that firms would stop encouraging frivolous use of paper. With the extortionate cost of printer ink, you'd think that firms would also be cost-conscious.
Uploading a 2 or 3 page document to the web in a PDF format is a criminal waste of resources, it's also an irritation that I don't need. I do not (and will never) work in a corporation. I do not need Office or PDF format -- ever. It's slow, and it's crap to read online.
I can cheerfully live my entire life without it, and I sincerely wish retarded developers and content managers would stop forcing it on me.
Re:Overuse of PDF (Score:4, Insightful)
Given that many of the organizations doing this are government organizations, and they use tax dollars, do you want your tax dollars spent on just redesigning output to be appropriate for HTML? I'll just deal with the (small) annoyance, thanks.
Any format can be exploited. The (over)use of PDF is not the issue here.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Additionally, plenty of academic papers, presentations, and posters are written with LaTeX. I would rather see people posting such material to the web (in PDF), rather than the alternative of not posting it, or spending time fighting to convert things to HTML and having it look awkward.
Re: (Score:2)
Bullshit. Ever write a mathematics paper? You won't be doing that anytime soon in html (or some variant) and you are just plain not in mathematics if you attempt it in Word. The only system is (La)TeX and it generally produces .pdfs.
Articles as Ads (Score:2)
Firefox should come with a minimal PDF reader (Score:3, Insightful)
Firefox should ship with some minimal PDF reader instead of Adobe's. There's an incredible amount of junk in Adobe's PDF reader, which adds both vulnerabilities and load time. Has anyone ever used the WebBuy feature of Adobe PDF Reader?
Re:Firefox should come with a minimal PDF reader (Score:4, Informative)
Not disagreeing here but you might like to know there is a common habit of disabling the loading of all the plugins in adobe. I forget how it is best done, but a cheap trick is renaming the plugin directory.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
C:\> del /f C:\Program Files\Adobe is probably the command you were thinking of.
If it wasn't then I heartily endorse it as an alternative.
Re: (Score:2)
It would be nice to see someone use Poppler [freedesktop.org] to create a fast loading plugin or firefox extension to view pdf files in the browser. I find that's one of the nicest features of Konqueror.
The format? (Score:2)
I suspect, that its not the PDF format itself that has 'vulnerabilities' but it is in fact a certain well-known software the *reads* PDF format. And possibly only when running on a certain well-known software platform that is itself not famous for its lack of vulnerabilities.
Of course, the vast majority of PHB's and Joe Sixpacks don't have the capacity or inclination to understand those distinctions, so TFA didn't bother to make it.
Infected PDF symptoms (Score:4, Funny)
1. Has a tendency to make your browser freeze up
2. Tries to infect some sort of TSR in Windows called Acrord32
3. Will frequently pop up a "checking for updates" dialog
4. Makes the fastest of computers slow to a crawl.
5. a super-jumpy scrolling interface
No wait, those aren't malware symptoms, that's just in Adobe's product. Next week we will discuss the incredible annoyances of the "java runtime environment" daily annoyances & clog-ups in "Add/Remove Programs". Do ANY software vendors know how annoying their software can be at times? Even Apple is guilty of forcing add-on installs you have no choice to get out of.
Really easy to fix this one (Score:2)
PDF displayers are a great example of the kind of application that should be trivially sandboxable. The process needs access to hardly anything; no network access needed, no filesystem access is even needed (just pipe the data in).
It should run as nobody.
Re: (Score:2)
You've never had to (legitimately) get into an verified PDF, I presume. ProtectedPDF is a company which make a living on keeping honest users from accessing their content. Luckly, once you've activated, there are ways to convert the data to a more useful format.
.txt file exploits on the rise (Score:2)
This title begs for a notnews. I just can't think of any ideas for it. Although WordPad for Windows 7 is probably vulnerable.
Re: (Score:2)
Meh, im sure a text file in Unicode or another more archaic encoding could screw up Internet Explorer or some word processor or another. I mean, databases have had encoding based attacks for SQL strings (not the same as SQL injection attacks), so why not text processors =P Especially if that have some inner scripting support. That would be amusing. Fear the txt of doom!
Exactly The Kind of Analysis We DON'T Need (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sorry, but in that very brief article linked, I saw absolutely ZERO analysis concerning frequency.
YAY! There's an exploit and toolkit. The existence of which is, in some sense, a useful piece of prior information for establishing the probability that there MIGHT BE an increase in frequency in the future - but it's quite a leap to have a freakin' /. link to a corporate article that uses hyperbole in claiming that there is some State of Nature or State of Knowledge that points to .pdf attacks being "On the rise".
PDF files (Score:2)
Re:Good news cause PDF's should be shunned (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's just that for some people PDFs are a hammer and every single printed word on the tubes is a nail.
I have had plenty of times where I was turning in papers electronically or needed to transfer documents between computers where PDF came in quite useful. When I'm turning in a paper electronically, I have no idea what version of Office the professor has. Nor do I even have Office. PDFs are very useful in this case.
Also, it may not be as bloated as you perceive. Acrobot reader is slow as hell. Evince and KPDF, both on Linux, are noticeably faster for me. There are alternatives for Windows as well that are better than the "official" reader.
Re:Good news cause PDF's should be shunned (Score:5, Interesting)
As a university professor, I actively encourage my students to use PDF files if possible. OS X and Linux come with PDF output, and I'm sure there's a way to do it in Windows without paying Adobe.
I also specifically PROHIBIT MS Office 2007/2008 .docx, .pptx, .xlsx, .xlwx, etc. formats. I'm not paying for an "upgrade" that completely changes the UI and introduces a new format without providing any real benefit to me.
Yes, I accept OpenOffice.org documents (as well as .dvi, .ps, and the formats from iWork)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Good news cause PDF's should be shunned (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
CutePDF. It shows as a printer. Print to it, and you get a file save dialog asking where to put the PDF.
As a bonus, it uses GPL Ghostscript as it's backend.
Re:Good news cause PDF's should be shunned (Score:5, Informative)
For Windows the best (and free/open source) tool I've found is PDFCreator [pdfforge.org]. It installs a "printer" on your computer that outputs to PDF. Using PDFCreator, you can make a PDF in any application that allows you to print. Using some of the "advanced" features (not really advanced, but slightly more complex than Print->PDF), you can even combine multiple print-outs from different applications into a single PDF.
Re: (Score:2)
I will make sure that I provide that information to my students. Thank you!
I would gladly accept Office 2007/2008 format documents if I could read them. The converter for OS X provided by Microsoft does not preserve the document formatting and it does not convert equations correctly. Since I teach graduate level computer science courses, both of those considerations are very important.
Fortunately, Office 2007 and 2008 both provide an easy to use "Save As" option that allows the students to save the document
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
I like PDFCreator but the last time I checked it didn't work with Vista.
Still a good program but I am sure that some students are stuck with a Vista machine.
CutePDF works with Vista and XP.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree. I like the fact that PDFCreator can automatically open a file in the default PDF reader (I use Foxit, myself, but I hear SumatraPDF is worth looking into) which is great when I'm developing printed reports. Saves a lot of trees.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
CutePDF will work for any program that can print.
Shouldn't all professors accept papers in at least one open format like PDF? Or even only accept documents in specific open formats? Just seems like the right way to do it. That way you don't require a student to buy any one specific program or use any specific OS.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'll look into it, but the last time I tried the one for OS X it didn't work. It caused major problems with the formatting of the document, amongst other things. (And I have Office 2004 installed on my machine.)
Re: (Score:2)
Learning to deal with twits dictating from their high horse is part of the real world... deal.
Re: (Score:2)
You are correct in that I neglected to mention that. I am sorry that my omission has lead to this misunderstanding.
It is strictly a technical issue. I want to be able to read my students' assignments. The OS X .docx converter converts to .rtf and does not preserve equations or formatting.
I will support .docx as soon as I can read the file format properly. I have contacted my university IT department and we have an arrangement with Microsoft to provide Office 2007/2008 to faculty. I will be picking up my cop
Re:Good news cause PDF's should be shunned (Score:5, Informative)
There are alternatives for Windows as well that are better than the "official" reader.
Specifically Sumatra PDF [kowalczyk.info] and Foxit Reader [foxitsoftware.com] are alternative PDF readers for Windows.
They are both orders-of-magnitude faster than Adobe Acrobat. Part of the reason for this speed boost is that they don't implement the hundreds of plug-ins that Acrobat supports. But frankly for >99% of the PDFs you encounter, those additional plug-ins are not required. (In the rare case where a PDF needs one of those features, I guess you can load up Acrobat.)
In addition to a speed advantage, using an alternate PDF reader is probably more secure. Both because it is less well-known (fewer exploits tailored to it), and because they don't implement those hundreds of plug-ins (some of which enable certain kinds of code execution).
Re: (Score:2)
I just tried it out since I hate when Adobe PDF viewer says "would you like to update now or in a little while (your computer is ours anyway - hahaha). You will not even be given the option of 'not at all' - hahaha".
I know someone here is thinking "Well, yea! You gotta keep up with the patchin'". But Adobe would like to infect my machine with flash. I prefer my coffe black and my PDFs as non-executables.
Re: (Score:2)
I found that Sumatra and Foxit didn't render as nicely as Adobe's Reader, which is a shame because I really wanted to use them. But you can make reader as fast as Foxit (actually, a tiny bit faster) by just renaming the "plugins" folder found in the folder where AcroRead.exe resides so it doesn't know where all that code is. It starts up without throwing errors at you too. I ended up putting the search.dll back in, but haven't missed anything else yet.
Should I assume that without all that extra plugin cra
Re: (Score:2)
Postscript.
Or just plain text.
Postscript is a programming language though. It can infinite loop and read / write files.