Archive for the ‘Virus/Malware Warnings’ Category

In the last few years admittingly Microsoft has been improving their products overall to prevent hackers and software vulnerabilities. Now you might say, that is great and it is, but one of the new problems that we are currently facing is a change in tactics. In recent months hackers have been targeting Adobe products.

Now you might say, how can adobe be a target?

Simple, Adobe develops products for all platforms, Macs, PC’s, Linux, Sco, Ubuntu, Suse, all have Adobe products in one form or another in them to make them for user friendly, such as Flash, Acrobat Reader, and so forth as used widely.

Now you might say, “I have a Mac, we don’t get viruses!” WRONG! As of September 4, 2009 with the release of Snow Leopard from Apple, apple is making great strides in trying to reduce the number of viruses and malware that enters in their systems. Yes, Mac’s get viruses but since the money is in the enterprise and Apples are not universally accepted in enterprise environments, attacking Mac based systems would not yield the kinds of results that a hacker who has spent months sometimes years working on hack would expect to get unless they target larger networks, i.e. pc based networks.

Now you say, “Well, I only read PDF documents, I don’t create them.” That’s all well and good but the actual Adobe Acrobat Reader program executes commands in the background that a compromised PDF document can access, sometimes if the settings are right, the virus or malware can have total control over the entire machine, compromising all the data within it. That is why Adobe is recommending that all users of all operating systems preform daily checks for updates to prevent zero day viruses and zero day intrusions.

At Triton Technologies we recommend checking your computers everyday if you a free standing PC or have a policy in place to do the updates at night.