Adobe breach

[SeijiSensei]

Adobe announced yesterday that its servers had been breached. Along with the two million accounts pilfered, the more disturbing news for Linux users is that source code was stolen as well. Both Acrobat Reader and Flash Player have a reputation for security holes. Now that the source is available to this band of thieves, we have to assume that the chances for additional exploits via Adobe products has increased.

While most of us here probably use Flash Player much more than Acrobat Reader, it is the latter program that poses the greater risk. We have already seen instances where carefully doctored PDF files have been used in attacks on client workstations. Since PDF documents are a normal part of business, installing an exploit by getting a CEO to read an infected PDF is an attractive strategy if you want to establish a back door into corporate servers.

[Erik1984]

Might be a good moment for Windows users to switch to a free alternative like SumatraPDF for simple PDF reading tasks.

[HansKisaragi]

Iv always used Chrome's built in PDF reader. Not touched Adobe reader in 10 years.

[monkeybrain20122]

So how safe is it for flash installed through Ubuntu's repo? Since Adobe's Linux support is so dismal anyway it may not be that big a deal for Linux users (I doubt that many people still use acroread as there are so many good pdf readers which use a lot less resources around)

[buzzingrobot]

Actually, this would be a great chance for Adobe to say, in effect, yeah, well, we know Flash and Acrobat were security nightmares, so we're gonna kill them off and roll out this slick new stuff we've been working on,

They'd get all kinds of hype, even if they were talking thorugh their hat.

[LillyDragon]

To think I was interested in the cloud services for Photoshop. Not this actually deters me from wanting it in the future; breaches happen. I learned some new tricks in the GIMP, (Addition is actually Linear Dodge, and shrinking images after applying a Gaussian blur gets a similar result to Photoshop's bi-cubic filtering.) so I won't need it any time soon anyway.

Still, this breach couldn't be more disheartening to existing customers. Adobe is the last company I'd expect to be compromised, so this is huge.