Adobe muscles in on Patch Tuesday

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 21 May 2009 at 10:49

Adobe is instigating quarterly security updates of its products, which will coincide with Microsoft's "Patch Tuesday".

The security of Adobe's products has come under increased scrutiny in recent months. Microsoft's Security Intelligence Report identified Adobe products as one of the biggest malware targets earlier this year and stressed the importance of application security updates.

It now appears Adobe has heeded Microsoft's advice: "Starting this summer with the initial output of our security code hardening effort, we plan to release security updates for all major supported versions and platforms of Adobe Reader and Acrobat on a quarterly basis," the company states on its Secure Software Engineering Team blog.

"Based on feedback from our customers, who have processes and resources geared toward Microsoft's 'Patch Tuesday' security updates, we will make Adobe's quarterly patches available on the same days."

Microsoft delivers its security updates on the second Tuesday of every month, hence the Patch Tuesday moniker. Adobe has, coincidentally it claims, released its last two security updates on Patch Tuesday.

Adobe says it's taking further measures to improve the security of its products, including "code hardening" - which involves threat modelling, automated and manual security code reviews for all Adobe products during their initial development.

The company also promises to improve the speed at which it pumps out patches.