Adobe To Surpass Microsoft As Hacker Target

Adobe Reader and Flash will surpass Microsoft Office applications as favorite targets of cybercriminals, a security vendor predicted Tuesday.

In unveiling its 2010 Threat Predictions report (PDF), McAfee said the growing popularity of the Adobe products has attracted the attention of cybercriminals, who have been increasingly targeting the applications. Adobe Reader and Flash are two of the most widely deployed applications in the world.

As a result of Adobe's success in client software, McAfee Labs believes "Adobe product exploitation will likely surpass that of Microsoft Office applications in 2010."

Security experts for quite a while have warned of the potential security risk posed by Flash. In November, Foreground Security identified a flaw in the way Web browsers handle Flash files that could be used to compromise Web sites that have users submit content.

Beyond Adobe, cybercriminals are also expected to step up efforts next year to crack social networking sites, as well as third-party applications in general. Internet users can expect crooks to use more complex Trojans and botnets to build and execute attacks and to take advantage of HTML 5 to create threats. HTML 5 is the next major revision of hypertext markup language, the core markup language of the Web.

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