

Adobe Acrobat possible vector for Chinese attacks on Google. - jmount
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60C2B720100113

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GiraffeNecktie
Flagging this for the bizaare misrepresentation of the article. There's no
suggestion that Adobe was the culprit (i.e. "implicated") and that's not the
article title or even the main thrust of the article.

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jmount
Flag whatever you want.

From the article: "Such attacks, most often delivered using Adobe PDF
documents sent by e-mail, secretly deposit a software file on a user's hard
drive allowing the computer to be remotely accessed. Typically, top personnel
with access to high-level information are targeted with such software, known
as malware."

That (plus Adobe's insistence of adding scripting to PDF) is why I used the
word implicated. Adobe may not have any bad intent on this, but they are
possibly partly responsible.

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scott_s
In the context of the past few days, your wording implies to me that Adobe was
implicated for perpetrating the attacks. That was not your intent, but that's
how it sounds to me, and I suspect to most people.

A better title is "PDF possible vector for Chinese attacks on Google."

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jmount
Fine, changing "Adobe implicated in Google security breach?" to "PDF possible
vector for Chinese attacks on Google." (adding this comment so the above
discussion has some remaining context). But I still think Adobe needs a bit of
heat on this issue.

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GiraffeNecktie
Unflagging now that the title is changed to something closer to the actual
article. It's a real pain when people use the title of an article to insert
their own editorial opinions.

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jmount
Adobe Acrobat seems to have been either cleared of suspicion:
<http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2358121,00.asp> or involved in only some
of the targets: <http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/01/google-hack-attack/>
. I still find it hard to believe that IE6 was an important vector into
Google- who there besides those in a sandboxed QA environment would use a
browser that out of date?

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jws
Is there any suggestion that this is PDF wide? Everything I've seen points to
an Adobe Acrobat problem.

At the risk of juggling the title even more, s/PDF/Adobe Acrobat/

~~~
jmount
Changed it again. But, no it seems to be Acrobat only. Funny coincidence this
is coming on the tail- end of an another Adobe worry for me. I found out you
can't install Adobe Acrobat Reader for Internet Explorer without installing
both Adobe Download Manager and Adobe AIR. Then I tried Firefox on Windows and
found out it refuses to install the plugin without admin rights, even though
Firefox had been installed by a user (without admin rights).

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btilly
Finally we're starting to see speculation about who some of the at least 20
other companies are.

