The Security Mentor

By now you must have heard that opening the wrong PDF file can compromise your computer.

The good news is that bad guys, as far as anyone knows, aren't taking advantage of this yet. And they don't have examples to work from to create a booby-trapped PDF, because the researcher who found the problem hasn't published how-to information pending a fix by Adobe.

There's no word on whether the bug affects other programs for reading PDFs. I use Foxit on my Windows machine.

Until Adobe releases a patch for the PDF reader, think twice about opening a PDF from a stranger and, since a PDF can be embedded in a web page, continue being careful what neighborhoods you visit on the web.