With more than a week until Adobe is scheduled to patch a critical vulnerability in its Reader and Acrobat applications, online thugs are targeting it with an unusually sophisticated attack.
The PDF file uses what's known as egg-hunting shellcode to compress the first phase of the malicious payload into 38 bytes, a tiny size that's designed to thwart anti-virus detection. As a result, just four of the 41 major AV programs detect the attack more than six days after the exploit surfaced, according to
this analysis from Virus Total.
