CVE-2007-5659 — Red Hat
HIGHCVE-2007-5659 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.8) CWE-120 vulnerability. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2022-06-08) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. No vendor fix is recorded yet; mitigation options are listed below.
Multiple buffer overflows in Adobe Reader and Acrobat 8.1.1 and earlier allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via a PDF file with long arguments to unspecified JavaScript…
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2022-06-08. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2022-06-22.
- A successful exploit gives an attacker total control of the affected component, not partial access.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA (KEV catalog and SSVC triage) for CVE-2007-5659.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2007-5659 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). In the shaded patch-first corner (EPSS 50%+, CVSS 7.0+).
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 394,415 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the 50–90% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
Multiple buffer overflows in Adobe Reader and Acrobat 8.1.1 and earlier allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via a PDF file with long arguments to unspecified JavaScript methods. NOTE: this issue might be subsumed by CVE-2008-0655.
Affected Products
acrobatadobeacrobat readeradobeResearch use only. For defensive security, authorized penetration testing, and academic research only. Never execute exploit code against systems without explicit written authorization.
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Detection & mitigation playbook
VulnerabilityDetect
Identify every host running the affected component and compare the installed build against the fixed version below — for source-built or distro-packaged software the version string, not a lockfile, is the source of truth (`dpkg -l`, `rpm -q`, or the binary's own `--version`).
Remediation status
No fixed release is recorded for CVE-2007-5659 yet. Track the upstream advisory, and apply the exposure-reduction steps below in the meantime.
Mitigate without a patch
Stop feeding it untrusted input: reject or quarantine files and payloads from unverified sources until you can upgrade, restrict accepted formats to the ones you actually need, and run the parsing or decoding step in a least-privileged sandbox or short-lived worker so a crash or corrupted read cannot reach the rest of the process.
Fixing This On Your OS
If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Extras for RHEL 3 | acroread-0:8.1.2-1.el3.6 | RHSA-2008:0144 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2007-5659 in your dependencies?
Find it across , including transitive dependencies.