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CISA KEV · ACTIVELY EXPLOITED
HIGH severity

CVE-2013-0641 — Acrobat

HIGH

CVE-2013-0641 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.8) CWE-120 vulnerability in adobe acrobat. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2022-03-03) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. A fix is available — see the affected versions and patch details below.

Buffer overflow in Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.x before 9.5.4, 10.x before 10.1.6, and 11.x before 11.0.02 allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via a crafted PDF document,…

Published
Updated
Affected
9 products
Patched
See advisory
Exploits
2 known
Exploitation data as of Oct 23, 2026 · OSV.dev, NVD, CISA KEV, FIRST.org (EPSS)

Exploitation Status

Actively exploited in the wild

  • Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2022-03-03. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2022-03-24.
  • 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-2013-0641.

EPSS Exploitation Probability

via FIRST.org ↗
32.3%probability of exploitation in next 30 days
Moderate Risk0.00%
Lower risk than most CVEs98th percentile — riskier than 98% of all scored CVEsHighest risk
15.7%43.8%71.9%100.0%88.0%32.3%Apr 26Aug 26Oct 26

Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.

How urgent is this, really

CVE-2013-0641 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.

Where this sits among everything scored

Of 395,249 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the 10–50% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.

Description

Buffer overflow in Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.x before 9.5.4, 10.x before 10.1.6, and 11.x before 11.0.02 allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via a crafted PDF document, as exploited in the wild in February 2013.

Affected Products

9 products · 17 configurations
Application
acrobatadobe
≥ 11.0 && < 11.0.02
range
Application
acrobat readeradobe
≥ 9.0 && < 9.5.4
range
OS
opensuseopensuse
2 versions
11.412.1
OS
enterprise linux desktopredhat
1 version
6.0
OS
enterprise linux eusredhat
2 versions
5.96.4
OS
enterprise linux serverredhat
1 version
6.0
Exploits & PoCs
2

Research use only. For defensive security, authorized penetration testing, and academic research only. Never execute exploit code against systems without explicit written authorization.

Detection & mitigation playbook

Vendor / appliance
  1. Detect

    Inventory every adobe acrobat deployment and check each version against the affected-products list above.

  2. Fix

    Apply the adobe acrobat security patch or hotfix for CVE-2013-0641 on the affected version, following the vendor advisory for your exact build.

  3. Workarounds

    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. Alongside that, restrict the management interface to trusted networks and apply the vendor's recommended configuration mitigations.

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.

Red HatCritical

This issue affects the version of Adobe Acroread as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6. Updates will be released as soon as they are made generally available by Adobe.

ProductFixed inAdvisory
Supplementary for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5acroread-0:9.5.4-1.el5_9RHSA-2013:0551

Frequently Asked Questions

Buffer overflow in Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.x before 9.5.4, 10.x before 10.1.6, and 11.x before 11.0.02 allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via a crafted PDF document, as exploited in the wild in February 2013.
O3 Security · Runtime Protection

Is CVE-2013-0641 being exploited in your environment?

Detect and block the exploit chain at execution, on systems you cannot patch yet.

Actively Exploited: CVE-2013-0641: Acrobat (High 7.8)