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Changes to Acrobat 9 make it insecure, expert warns

Internet security concerns about Adobe's Acrobat 9 have been raised by a Russian online security firm, which says recent changes to the platform could make it an easy target for cyber crooks.

In a bid to make it easy for users to recover a password, Adobe recently made some changes to the algorithm used to password-protect PDF documents in Acrobat 9.

Announcing the changes in a briefing, Adobe stated: "The current specification for password-based 256-bit AES encryption in PDF provides greater performance than the previous 128-bit AES implementation."

However, according to Russian password recovery software producer Elcomsoft, Acrobat 9 is now "a hundred times less secure".

The firm says the change makes cracking weak or short passwords with only upper and lower case letters up to 100 times faster compared to Acrobat 8, posing security threats.

Elcomsoft software is used by companies to recover passwords forgotten by employees as well as law enforcement agencies.

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