by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Adobe Flash, as well as Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader have been affected by a dangerous bug. This bug can be used to cause the applications to crash. It may also be possible to inject malicious code into the affected machine or even to take over the system.
Adobe is aware of the issue and has been putting out patches by now. Affected are Adobe Flash Player 10.0.45.2 and older version that run under Windows, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS. The "authplay.dll" that is included in Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader is also affected in some ways so that users of those two programs are also in danger.
No such problems seem to exist with open source programs, as far as PDF readers and makers are concerned, such as Nitro PDF Reader, which must be one of the best free PDF readers available, and PDF Creator for the making of PDF files.
It is, as we can see again and again, not always a case of “you get what you pay for” as often, it would appear, open source software is much better designed than proprietary one.
Meanwhile a new version of Adobe Flash Player is available and it is highly recommended that this be downloaded at the earliest opportunity.
I am not, as yet, aware of any patches for Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader and maybe, just maybe, people should consider, at least for the time being, to make use of some of the available open source programs for those purposes.
© 2010
