Back in October, I posted a note about an announcement from Adobe of new versions of their popular Reader and Acrobat software, which would incorporate a security technology known as sandboxing. The idea of the sandbox is to isolate the processing of potentially untrustworthy content from the rest of the application. Google’s Chrome browser, for example, uses sandboxing to isolate plugin processing.
Adobe has now released the new Reader X version for the Windows, Mac OS X, and Android platforms. (I have not been been able to find a release schedule for Linux/UNIX.) The release announcement on Adobe’s blog contains some additional information; it also contains links to oter blog posts that discuss the technical implementation of the sandbox in some detail. You can get the installation packages for the new version from Adobe’s standard download page.
Bear in mind that this is a totally new version of Reader, and is distinct from the security update (to version 9.4.1) that I wrote about a couple of days ago. I suggest that you make sure that you have that update installed, and continue to use that version for work you need to get done. I do recommend, for Windows users especially, getting a copy of Reader X and testing it, since I think that the concept of sandboxing is a good one. However, major changes like this are very seldom entirely free of problems at the beginning, and in fact some conflicts with certain third-party security products have been reported. I think doing come testing before committing to the new version is only prudent.
Update Friday, 26 November, 11:05 EST
Brian Krebs also has a post on this new version at his “Krebs on Security” blog.
Posted by Rich 
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