Email Scams Capitalizing on the Adobe Acrobat X Release

Adobe warns that cyber criminals are piggybacking on the Adobe Acrobat X availability news in order to phish personal information from users.

On Monday Adobe announced the release of Acrobat X solutions, which includes the Acrobat program itself and new Acrobat.com services, like the Adobe SendNow.

Acrobat X provides new collaboration and document publishing features that are sure to interest a lot of people, especially those in corporate environments.

From a security perspective, the most important change is the Protected Mode, a sandboxed environment modeled after the one in Google Chrome.

This new enabled-by-default feature is expected to hinder most PDF-based exploits from executing arbitrary code on computers.

"With the availability of Adobe Acrobat X solutions this week, a reminder to be cautious when receiving email messages purporting to offer a download of a new version of Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader sent by entities claiming to be Adobe.

"Many of these emails require recipients to register and/or provide personal information. Please be aware that these emails have not been sent by Adobe or on Adobe's behalf," warns the Adobe Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT).

It's worth noting that Adobe Reader X, which is of interest to more people than Acrobat, has not been released yet. It is, however, expected to become available by the end of this month.

Spam emails directing users to websites that offer fake Adobe Reader updates are not something new. We reported two such scams back in May and July.

Users are advised to only obtain the product directly from Adobe's website or from well known software download portals. For example, Softpedia also offers a way to keep up with new releases.

You can register a free account (only a valid email address required), and add the product to your software subscription list. You will then be notified via email every time our editors update the product listing.