Security vulnerabilities within Adobe Reader, Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Flash Player have been detected which are getting actively exploited – manipulated PDF channel malware into computers – on the net currently. According to a security advisory Adobe is currently investigating the problem and plans an update for the 30th of July.
Avira antivirus solutions already detect the malicious PDF files as EXP/Pidief.TH and the dropped malware as TR/Drop.Wmach and TR/Spy.WMach. Anyhow Avira advises to take additional security measures until Adobe provides an update.
Adobe recommends to delete or rename the file authplay.dll that ships with the Reader and with Acrobat. Also, enabling Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and activating the User Access Control (UAC) in Windows Vista shall mitigate the risk according to Adobe.
Another solution would be using a different PDF reader and disabling Adobe PDF and Flash within the web browser via its add-ons-manager. The NoScript extension for Firefox also helps preventing Flash applications to run in the browser; it is possible that drive-by-downloads via malicious Flash applications embedded in web sites turn up soon. (Source: Avira GmbH/GST)