Viruses/Worms News

Adobe borrows 'patch Tuesday' approach from Microsoft

Thursday, May 21, 2009

Adobe said yesterday that it will begin sending out security fixes on the second Tuesday of every third month beginning sometime this summer, in response to criticism that the company has been too slow to respond to flaws in its PDF Reader and Acrobat software.

Similar to the approach taken by Microsoft, which sends out security updates on the second Tuesday of each month, popularly called patch Tuesday, Adobe's director for product security said the company picked the day to make it easier for IT staff to handle the updates.

"The feedback from customers is that getting any patches for Reader and Acrobat out at the same time as Microsoft allows them to leverage existing processes and resources to get desktops updated as quickly as possible," Adobe's Brad Arkin said, according to the Washington Post Security Fix blog.

Adobe also said it will issue patches more regularly when security flaws become known. The company was roundly criticized for taking weeks to fix a bug in Reader and Acrobat that allowed attackers to execute arbitrary code via a PDF file.

Security experts said nearly half of all targeted attacks this year were designed to exploit flaws in Acrobat and Reader, according to the Security Fix blog.
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