Adobe Acrobat may be quietly sabotaging your antivirus

Date:
Wed, 22 Jun 2022 15:19:00 +0000

Description:
Some Adobe products seem to be having compatibility issues with most AV solutions.

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It seems that Adobe Acrobat is blocking most antivirus software from scanning PDF files at launch, putting users at risk.

The issue was first identified by cybersecurity researchers from Minerva
Labs. As reported by BleepingComputer , Minerva spotted Adobe Acrobat
scanning for DLL files from 30 security products, to see if theyre loaded
into memory while its active. These products also include the industrys heavy hitters, such as Bitdefender, Avast, Trend Micro, Symantec, Malwarebytes, ESET, Kaspersky, F-Secure, Sophos, and Emsisoft.

If it finds any, it most likely blocks them, preventing any monitoring activity, the report states.

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Since March of 2022 weve seen a gradual uptick in Adobe Acrobat Reader processes attempting to query which security product DLLs are loaded into it by acquiring a handle of the DLL, Minerva Labs explained.

Bleeping Computer also found a user complaint on the Citrix forum, saying Sophos Antivirus started getting errors after an Adobe product was installed, and that the company suggested disabling DLL-injection for Acrobat and
Reader.

We are aware of reports that some DLLs from security tools are incompatible with Adobe Acrobats usage of CEF, a Chromium based engine with a restricted sandbox design, and may cause stability issues, wrote Adobe, in response to complaints. Read more

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At the moment, its working on a fix, to ensure proper functionality with Acrobat's CEF sandbox design going forward.

According to Minerva Labs, between compatibility issues and disabling antivirus solutions, Adobe chose the latter, putting its users at real risk
of malware , ransomware , and other nasties lurking in the depths of the internet.

PDF files are known to have been used by threat actors in the past. Only recently, researchers spotted a campaign that uses PDF files, through which malicious Word files were being distributed to target endpoints.

Via BleepingComputer



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/news/adobe-acrobat-may-be-quietly-sabotaging-your-an tivirus/


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