Adobe plans emergency fix for Reader, Acrobat

Adobe plans to release an out-of-cycle patch next week for a "critical" PDF flaw disclosed at last week's Black Hat conference, the company announced Thursday. The update to Reader 9.3.3 for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX and Acrobat 9.3.3 for Windows and Mac is expected to fix a number of vulnerabilities, including one revealed by researcher Charlie Miller at last week's show. That flaw, caused by an integer overflow error in the way the PDF viewer parses fonts, could lead to memory corruption or code execution. Adobe was considering releasing the fix during its normal quarterly cycle in October, but decided otherwise, even though there are no reported exploits. — DK