CVE-2013-0641 — Acrobat
HIGHCVE-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,…
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
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
acrobatadobeacrobat readeradobeopensuseopensuseenterprise linux desktopredhatenterprise linux eusredhatenterprise linux serverredhatResearch 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 / applianceDetect
Inventory every adobe acrobat deployment and check each version against the affected-products list above.
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.
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.
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.
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Supplementary for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 | acroread-0:9.5.4-1.el5_9 | RHSA-2013:0551 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2013-0641 being exploited in your environment?
Detect and block the exploit chain at execution, on systems you cannot patch yet.