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A security researcher from Sophos speaking at the Virus Bulletin 2010 conference asked for the audience of security professionals to vote regarding Adobe’s PDF standard.
Based on the continued security threats posed by Adobe’s ubiquitious portable document format, or more accurately Adobe Reader, virtually all of the audience voted to replace the malware plagued standard according to a report by V3.co.uk.
The Sophos researcher, Paul Baccus, had suggested a new portable document format with tighter security credentials could be used to replace the troubled PDF standard. At one point Baccus had reportedly asked if anyone from Adobe was in the session only to have one of the attendees yell back "Of course not, it’s a security conference."
While the vote by itself doesn’t mean anything is going to happen to PDF, much less due to the enormous market penetration the format has in terms of Adobe Reader and the universe of material already published in PDF, format, it does show that the string of zero-day vulnerabilities in Adobe software has taken its toll on the company, at least as far as reputation in security circles.
Virus Bulletin continues in Vancouver and tommorow will feature a number of talks discussing the Stuxnet worm which has been alleged to be of such sophistication that it likely engineered by a nation state as a cyberweapon aimed at Iranian nuclear facilities.
