Spammers target PDF exploit again

 

Gallery

By Stuart Turton

Posted on 24 Oct 2007 at 08:07

Days after Adobe patched a major security vulnerability in its Reader and Acrobat software, hackers are bombarding inboxes with malware infected PDFs intended to hijack the computer of users who've yet to update.

The surge was highlighted by Symantec in its blog, which identified the malware as Trojan.Pidief.A, which it says has been "spammed out in targeted attacks on specific business organizations."

The Trojan will most likely arrive through email with a subject such as "invoice", "statement" or "bill" and contain just a PDF file, named along similar lines. If the PDF is opened and the vulnerability exploited, it will run code to lower Window's defences and download and spread further malware.

The vulnerability was discovered on September 20 by the Gnucitizen website and only affects users running Windows XP and Internet Explorer 7.

Adobe has already released patches..