According to a report on Wednesday by ZDNet, there is a zero day vulnerability that turns Adobe Acrobat PDFs into trojan installers. Adobe reportedly has no fix at this time, and no advice for what to do until a fix is developed.
My management has suggested, "Our advice is to never open PDFs from people you don’t know or from organizations that don’t normally communicate with you via e-mail. You can expect a flurry of legitimate looking e-mails coming your way with infected PDFs." This advice comes from act4networks.com.
What does this mean for your humble editor? Well, I, along with every other editor in the world, get many (10 or more) PDFs every day from people we don't know well and even from people we don't know at all.
Our editorial guidelines say we don't want PDFs, that we want .doc or .rtf files. However, most PR and marketing people we interact with just don't bother to read the Editorial Guidelines for Control and ControlGlobal.com. Yes, this is a PDF, but I guarantee it is a clean one. And everybody knows me.
So until further notice (like probably forever) Control and ControlGlobal.com are not going to accept press releases sent as PDFs unless we really really know you well...and you know who you all are.
Make it a .doc file or better yet, a .rtf file, and a 300 dpi jpeg. To really get me to read it, ALSO embed the text in the email you send. If I am really busy, teaser emails that don't have the actual release embedded in it sometimes don't get read. And if the email just says, here's a press release from the Ummagumma Corporation, it is likely to not get read.
Thanks for letting me rant at you. I never thought I'd become a cranky editor, but now, after seven years, I understand completely why most editors are cranky.
