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Poison PDF pusher released to public

A quick download, a couple of clicks, a naughty URL and you're in the business of crime

Attacking enterprises just got easier with the development of an idiot-friendly tool that spits out booby-trapped PDFs with a few clicks.

The tool weaves existing exploits into PDFs, allowing attacks against Adobe Reader and Acrobat versions 8.x prior to 8.2.1 and 9.x before 9.3.1.

Users can insert their own URL pointers into the program, which then spits out an exploited PDF. Microsoft's free anti-virus had blocked the attack (CVE-2010-0188) in a test and it was likely other platforms would raise flags too.

Only unpatched users could be effectively targeted, but given the poor state of patching, that provides a pretty big pool of potential victims.

Users could combine the tool with one of many free or paid automated phishing platforms to create the ultimate lazy targeted attack system.

While the black hat uses for the tool were obvious, penetration testers and internal security teams can use it to launch attacks against staff to help improve social engineering awareness and defences.

SecRecon freelance security bod Claes Spett developed the tool while building a private exploit kit to help him pop organisations during penetration tests.

He published the executable to Google Drive, with the usual "at your own risk" caveat, here. El Reg urges users to play responsibly. ®

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