A cybersecurity researcher is urging users to upgrade Adobe Acrobat Reader after a fix was released yesterday for a remote code execution zero-day with a public in-the-wild proof-of-concept exploit.
The flaw is tracked as CVE-2024-41869 and is a critical use after free vulnerability that could lead to remote code execution when opening a specially crafted PDF document.
A "use after free" bug is when a program tries to access data in a memory location that has already been freed or released. This causes unexpected behavior, such as a program crashing or freezing.
However, if a threat actor is able to store malicious code in that memory location, and the program subsequently accesses it, it could be used to execute malicious code on the targeted device.
The flaw has now been fixed in the latest Acrobat Reader and Adobe Acrobat versions.
