Adobe have released an urgent update for Adobe Reader DC, patching newly discovered security vulnerabilities.

The highly popular PDF app, often pre-installed on Windows PCs, has been shown to contain a loophole that allows an attacker to remotely run Javascript code within an opened PDF to cause memory corruption.

Currently rated ‘Critical’ by Adobe’s Severity Rating System, the bug is believed to have originated from entirely legitimate functionality: Adobe Reader allows PDFs to contain embedded JavaScript to support interactions with the web.

Adobe have responded quickly – publishing the fix to Adobe Security Bulletin alongside patching for 42 other vulnerabilities as of Wednesday 12th February, including one which allowed PDF documents to access hashed passwords.

Adobe Reader is officially 25 years old this year, and although official figures are hard to source, is popularly believed to dominate more than 75% of the PDF software market.

Users can either auto-update their installation or prompt this manually by clicking ‘Help’ > ‘Check for Updates’ within the software itself.

For software and security expertise, contact Lineal today.

An unfortunate hoax is catching out iPhone users this week, Lineal have learned, after many users discovered resetting the date will completely destroy their iPhone.

Despite what a website may promise you – DO NOT reset the clock on any iOS device to January 1st 1970 under any circumstances. This will permanently break (or ‘brick’) your device.

A device broken in this way will simply display the Apple iOS loading screen forever, permanently stuck. The bug, which prevents the phone counting Unix time (a count of seconds since 00:00 01.01.1970) if the clock is set ‘before’ this using local time (UTC-1), is impossible to fix without hardware support from Apple to remove the battery.

You have been warned!

For expert apple support from Lineal, contact us today: 01271 375999 or click here.