PDF Readers, Vulnerabilities, Exploits... Oh My!
With the recent vulnerabilities in Adobe Acrobat/Reader and reported exploits, I just want to point you all to a free, light-weight self-executable PDF reader for Windows: Foxit Reader 2.0. It's super fast for simple text PDFs, however it sometimes has issues and slows down to a crawl when working with large, graphically complicated PDFs (like those damn product brochures from various vendors who shall remain nameless). Oh, and also... there have been no reported vulnerabilities or exploits out there for it (that doesn't mean it's fully secure, but it's pretty good track record so far).
My recommendation would be for everyone to use Foxit as their default reader and in Adobe Acrobat and Reader remove unneeded plugins and disable vulnerable settings such as:
- "Automatically detect urls in text"
- "Display PDFs in browser windows"
- "Allow documents to open other files and launch other applications"
- "Allow multimedia operations"