MANILA, Philippines - Popular Adobe software products have been identified as primary targets of hackers and virus writers worldwide, according to Kaspersky Lab's report "Information Security Threats in the First Quarter of 2010."

This is due to Adobe products' prevalence and multi-platform capabilities.

Moreover, users of Adobe products are usually unaware of the potential threat they may get by opening PDF files of unknown origin.

The most popular threats are from the Exploit.Win32.Pdfka family and the Exploit.Win32.Pidief family. Together, they account for a total of 47.5% or nearly half of all detected exploits.

They take advantage of vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat. When users open PDF documents with these exploits, malware is downloaded and launched without the users' knowledge and consent.

The report highlights the fact that many users of Adobe products have not installed the patches designed to remove the software’s vulnerabilities, thus making them susceptible to attack.

Of the top ten most prevalent software vulnerabilities detected on users’ computers in the first quarter of 2010, three were found in Adobe products, six were found in Microsoft products, and one was found in a Sun product.

The three vulnerabilities targeting Adobe’s programs were found on 23.37%, 17.87%, and 15.27% of the computers examined, with the first and last being critical vulnerabilities that allow remote hackers to take full control of a system.

One of the vulnerabilities in Adobe’s products that became public knowledge over three years ago has had a patch available for all that time, but many users are still not updating their software.

To resolve this problem,  Adobe launched last April 13 an automated update service that runs in the background. Developers are hoping that this will help reduce the number of unpatched applications that are so appealing to cybercriminals.

The full quarterly report, entitled "Information Security Threats in the First Quarter of 2010", can be found at www.securelist.com.