PDFs are everywhere, from game manuals to technical papers on the web to documents sent between businesses. They are also becoming a very popular attack vector for malware distributors. You can read more about the types of attacks at Slashdot, and some of the other oftware that is being targeted with similar attacks, but the prevention is fairly easy … patch early and patch often and use a different PDF viewer that doesn’t auto execute scripts.
"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.’"
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