Adobe readies critical Reader and Acrobat patches

Adobe has issued a pre-notification of its security patches for April, which will include fixes for the Reader and Acrobat applications, and will be delivered through a new update system.

The firm has been testing the new service with beta customers since October, and will roll it out to all users on 13 April.

Steve Gottwals, a product manager at Adobe, said in a blog post that the beta tests of the updater had been successful with early customers, and will help users stay on top of patches and keep systems up to date.

"The beta process has been successful, and we have incorporated several positive changes to the end-user experience and system operation," he said. "Now, we are ready for the next phase of deployment."

The updater will run behind the scenes and has been optimised to work on Linux and Windows operating systems. Adobe recommends automatic updates, but this is not a default and users can choose when to install the patches.

"The majority of attacks we are seeing exploit software installations that are not up to date with the latest security fixes. We therefore believe that the automatic update option is the best choice for most end users," said Gottwals.

The critical patches scheduled for next week cover Adobe Reader 9.3.1 for Windows, Macintosh and Unix; Adobe Acrobat 9.3.1 for Windows and Macintosh; and Adobe Reader 8.2.1 and Acrobat 8.2.1 for Windows and Macintosh.

Adobe releases its patches on a quarterly basis, and this latest round coincides with a significant security update from Microsoft.