Adobe PDF documents might compromise your PC, according to a security Relevant Products/Services researcher. Petko Petkov, a "creative hacker" who has previously found that Windows Media Player can harbor malicious files and that there's a critical bug in the way the Firefox browser works with QuickTime, is now reporting problems with PDFs.
Petkov said he has tested the issue with Windows XP Service Pack 2 and the latest Adobe Reader 8.1, but said that previous versions of Reader are also vulnerable.
For users, he is advising only one course of action at the moment. Users should not "open any PDF files (locally or remotely)," he wrote, adding that other PDF viewers besides Adobe Reader could also be affected.
"Adobe Acrobat/Reader PDF documents can be used to compromise your Windows box," he wrote Thursday on his blog. "Completely!!! Invisibly and unwillingly!!! All it takes is to open a PDF document or stumble across a page which embeds one."
He described the issue as a high-risk vulnerability of critical importance, given PDF's popularity for business use. PDFs are frequently used to distribute press releases, contracts, designs, manuals, and other material that the creator does not want altered.
Petkov said that because of the importance of PDF as a format, and the fact that "it may take a while for Adobe to fix their closed source product," he would not be publishing any code until Adobe has issued an update. He has reported that Adobe has confirmed the issue.