When it comes to security, 2010 has been a watershed year for Adobe.
And the very flexibility that allows a PDF file to include everything from a complex presentation, to a government form, to a high-end catalog, creates a wide attack surface for criminals to take advantage of. But it’s very popularity and ubiquity is a challenge to security allowing attackers to target a single program widely used on Macs, Windows PCs, and Linux systems. Supported by a free viewer (Adobe Reader) on all major computing platforms, it allows people to read faithfully rendered documents created in hundreds of programs (either natively or converted to PDF using Adobe Acrobat). Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) is the single most popular file format for sharing documents on the Internet.
