Hackers are refining their ‘qishing’ techniques by hiding malicious QR codes in PDF documents attached to emails impersonating major organizations.

New research from Barracuda Networks highlighted the rapid evolution of qishing attacks – a social engineering technique that uses QR codes to redirect users to phishing pages – which has grown over the last three months.

Threat intelligence researchers at Barracuda detected more than half a million phishing emails with QR codes embedded in PDF documents between 20 June and 18 September 2024.

The report noted a shift from embedding the QR codes directly into the emails themselves versus hiding them in PDFs attached to the message.

Most of the attack samples analyzed by Barracuda involved impersonating reputable companies, such as Microsoft, which represented the majority of qishing attacks in this period.

Messages mimicking emails from Microsoft's Sharepoint and OneDrive services comprised over half (51%) of all attacks detected.

DocuSign was also a popular brand to impersonate, accounting for 31% of the phishing messages caught by Barracuda, followed by Adobe at 15%.

The report added that a smaller percentage of the phishing attacks it studied were tailored to the target, pretending to originate from the HR department of the victim’s organization.

Barracuda noted that certain industries such as finance, healthcare, and education, are increasingly being targeted with qishing attacks, owing to the large quantities of sensitive data they manage.

In addition, SMBs were highlighted in the report as particularly vulnerable to these attacks, since they lack the advanced security layers needed to pick up these more sophisticated phishing techniques.

New qishing tactic could spell trouble for SMBs

Barracuda noted that the shift in tactics from embedding the QR codes into the body of the email to hiding them in attached PDF documents makes it more difficult for traditional defenses to identify and block the threats.

The attack vector also involves the victim using multiple devices to scan the code, often their personal phone, which is likely not protected with the same level of security software as a corporate device, the report warned.

Kyle Blanker, manager of software engineering at Barracuda, warned businesses that their traditional email security systems could be ill-equipped to deal with these new attacks.

“Traditional email threat scanners can miss phishing content and malicious payloads if they are embedded within PDFs, which makes this an attractive tactic for attackers trying to evade detection. Between June and September our security technologies detected around half a million attempted attacks where weaponized QR codes were embedded in PDFs,” he explained.

The time required to launch a phishing attack, as well as its cost, is relatively low compared to other attack vectors, Blanker added, arguing this is why threat actors are able to swiftly augment their tactics to get around cyber defenses.

“Phishing is a relatively low cost, easy to implement attack vector with potentially high rewards, so it is not surprising that attackers are continuously trying new approaches to overcome the latest advances in protection,” he said.

“For example, our security researchers have recently reported on a new generation of phishing QR codes built from text-based ASCII/Unicode characters, and using specially crafted URLs to create hard-to-detect phishing pages.”

In the digital age, the idea of entire businesses being run on paper documents is near impossible to imagine, but forms and documents are still being used in many organisations.

Printed documents that have to be completed by hand can be costly, time-consuming and slow for companies. There is also an environmental impact to consider, with recent studies showing almost seven in ten sheets are eventually wasted.

The time it takes for employees to edit paper documents is a problem for businesses and makes it harder to respond to developments quickly. This can cause backlogs and clog up an operation.

With the risks involved in non-compliance as well as significant advances in document editing, management and workflow technology, it’s little wonder that many companies have long since started using alternatives.

PDFs have been around for decades, and there’s a reason for the format’s enduring popularity; it provides an efficient way to combine the best elements of digital technology to paper documents, thanks to things like enhanced security, OCR and advanced editing features.

Forms and documents are old school and can have serious implications for data processing and legal security. It's time to join the rest of the world and go digital.

The advantages of PDFs

Efficiency is one of the key advantages of using PDFs; it’s much easier to fill out a digital form via entering data or signatures into pre-assigned textboxes in a PDF than it is to print it out, complete it by hand, re-scan the completed form and then share it with the relevant party.

The resulting delay between data capture and data processing makes matters worse. Direct capture without disruption can easily overcome these issues - rather than printing out a form and getting it to the relevant department, employees can transmit a completed version directly, with the whole process being completely traceable.

According to IDC, putting in place digital-first document processes like this can boost revenue by 36%, while slashing costs by 30%. Analysts estimate that business and legal risks fall by a third when forms are electronically processed end-to-end. PDFs also offer the ability to make it impossible to edit documents beyond filling in certain sections. Other fully-editable document formats, such as Word docs, can have their formatting completely ruined by one misplaced keystroke.

Paper and printed documents can also entail legal problems. Certain aspects of data privacy make hard copy forms and printouts problematic. Without PDFs, it is very difficult to specify the authorised user group for a document. Anyone with physical access to the records, or who just happens to be standing by the printer when the document prints, has access to potentially sensitive data. Paper documents can be stolen or simply picked up with no way of tracking them down.

In comparison, electronically-produced and distributed PDF documents are considerably safer. Many providers have encryption and access options that mean unauthorised people can't read them. With access management, you can specify who can view, print or change files.

Companies that use PDF documents are also in the best position when it comes to providing proof of communication. Most email providers store a copy of all sent messages and attachments, so that it can be legally proved which document was sent to which address and when. With digital signatures and e-signatures becoming a prevalent method of authenticating digital documentation, users can also be more confident than ever before that regulations are being complied with.

Contrary to popular belief, digital signatures and e-signatures aren’t the same thing, but it’s easy to spot the difference. Digital signatures use encrypted code to authenticate a signer’s identity to sign documents electronically. E-signtures, on the other hand, refer to any electronic process that indicates acceptance of an agreement or a record.

They both replace traditional, inefficient signatures while facilitating digital business transactions, and are as legally binding as a hand-written signature. As a rule of thumb, e-signature processes are easier to implement than their more advanced, yet technically demanding, digital signature cousins.

When looking for a digital authentication solution it’s worth bearing in mind that different countries require different levels of signature verification. Some prefer digital signatures due to the advanced identity verification they provide, while others' legislation will be slightly looser.

You don’t need an overflowing bin beneath your desk to remind you that paper is disposable. Neither is it durable. By maintaining electronic files, you are ensuring that data remains backed up, be it on hard-drives, flash-drives, or stored safely in the cloud. While this could sound slightly labour-intensive, cloud-based systems can be scheduled to provide automatic backups, removing the need for staff to spend valuable work-hours maintaining these electronic files. PDFs can also be made searchable, making it much easier to find the specific information that you’re looking for when trawling through multiple large documents.

What to look for in a PDF tool

All of the major browsers now include in integrated viewer allowing PDF files to be opened and read, but if you want to actually create or edit PDFs yourself, there are a few options. Document creation suites like Word or Google Docs allow files to be saved as PDFs, but they don’t allow for the more in-depth customisation offered by dedicated tools.

PDF editors include the ability to do a huge range of things, including redact sensitive information, batch-convert files to or from PDF, password -protect confidential PDFs, and even create PDFs from scanned documents - complete with making any text searchable and editable through optical character recognition.

The list of potential features and functionality offered by PDF programmes is almost endless, but which ones you’ll need likely depends on the nature of your business and what you use PDFs for. If you’re looking to digitise a large amount of hard-copy documents, then batch-processing and high-quality OCR should be at the top of your wish-list. On the other hand, if your goal is to create PDF-based marketing assets like flyers, reports or brochures, then you’ll be more in need of in-depth layout, editing and collaboration tools.

Pricing is a factor too; some vendors offer their PDF editors via a subscription model, while others will let you purchase it outright. Your preference for CapEx versus OpEx will likely be a deciding factor in which one you find most attractive, but bear in mind that a one-off purchase may mean you don’t benefit from future feature updates.

Whatever your needs, there’s almost certainly going to be a PDF editor that’s right for you - and we’ve put six of them through their paces to help you find it.

PDFelement offers every PDF-editing tool you’ll ever need – and more. And when you consider that the cheapest subscription to Acrobat Pro is £181 inc VAT per year, it’s an absolute bargain. A Pro option ($129) adds OCR, but the Standard variant we tested is likely to be enough for most users.

PDFelement handled even the largest PDFs with ease. Basic functions such as inserting, splitting, replacing and extracting pages are controlled via a neat flatplan interface, and reordering pages is a simple drag-and-drop process.

The editing tools are amongst the best we’ve used: fonts are recognised straight away and you can tweak a text box’s content, colour, position and size by simply clicking on it. The watermark tool brings up a handy preview dialog, where you can specify its opacity and whether you’d like it above or behind the text.

Meanwhile, the Comment tab is a proofreader’s dream: you can highlight, underline and strikethrough text – as well as add boxes, callouts and sticky notes. If you’re part of a multi-person workflow or often work with sensitive information, there’s a range of stamps such as “Approved”, “Void” and “Confidential” to drag onto the page.

The Form tab lets you add forms with tick boxes, lists, images and data signatures, which is useful if you require customer or colleague feedback on a document. What would otherwise take ten minutes to create in Word takes a fraction of the time in PDFelement.

Then there’s privacy. The redact tool under the Protect tab allows you to black out text, with planned deletions appearing with a red border before you confirm them. You can also encrypt, password-protect and digitally sign a PDF, or permanently remove information.

You’re well covered in the compatibility department: conversion to TXT, RTF, Word, Excel and PowerPoint files are PDF editor staples, but you can also transform your document into often overlooked formats such as EPUB and HTML. What’s more, the software provides time-saving buttons to share PDFs directly to Dropbox, Google Drive or, if you need specific eyes on your document, email.

In short, PDFelement is stuffed with convenient features, while doing the basics exceptionally well. And, in a world of subscriptions, the ability to buy it outright for a reasonable price only sweetens an already lip-smacking deal.

Able2Extract takes a pared-back approach that focuses on presenting the basics in a clean interface. The website describes it as “Your Swiss Army knife for PDF files”, which sounds laudable until you see that it costs $150 compared to $79 for Wondershare’s exceptional PDFelement software. Suddenly the knife seems sharper.

Sadly, its performance is blunt. The barebones Edit Document tab contains tools for editing or adding text, shapes and images, alongside redaction, Bates numbering, merge, insert, delete and resize functions. We found editing to be a fiddly job, with text boxes often taking a few clicks to jump to life. Oddly, you have to manually draw on redactions, highlights and strikethroughs by default, rather than them automatically sticking to a line of text.

The curiosities continue in the Custom Excel tab, which lets you add tables to PDFs and then convert them to an Excel file. In practice, it was laggy and frustrating to control. The Sign and Secure tab, meanwhile, is almost empty: you can add a digital signature, set passwords, toggle a tick-box list of permissions and that’s your lot.

The form-creation tool is a similar exercise in frustration, with various elements sticking to your mouse and generating old-fashioned dialog boxes that beep at you. It’s lucky that the undo button is huge and located at the left of the toolbar, because you’ll be needing it a lot.

Able2Extract’s saving grace is the Convert tab, which houses a generous selection of file types: CSV, HTML, AutoCAD, TXT, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, searchable PDF and Microsoft Office. You can also copy a whole PDF to your clipboard, take a screenshot and set batches of PDFs to convert. That “searchable PDF” option implements optical character recognition (OCR) on scans, but results from a dog-eared and yellowing page from a 1981 NME were poor: huge swathes were highlighted in blue when we wanted to pick out an individual sentence and the search function was patchy.

Able2Extract is easier to navigate than other PDF editors, with a minimalist interface, but that’s because the feature set is slim. That issue is compounded by that fact its performance – even while doing rudimentary edits – was poor and the tucked-away OCR tool was lacklustre compared to cheaper options.

And that’s the biggest blot on Able2Extract’s copybook: it’s almost double the price of PDFelement and over double that of Sejda PDF Desktop, both of which will provide swifter edits and more tools.

A small part of us quite wanted to see Adobe Acrobat Pro’s throne usurped by one of the other PDF editors, but it’s the de facto standard for a reason. This, if you can stomach the price, is a simply fabulous piece of software.

Although it took the longest to install, users are immediately given the tools they’re most like to use on a daily basis: the highlighting, sticky notes and export functions sit front and centre, either on the main or right-hand toolbar. That means there’s no navigating through icon-strewn tabs in search of, say, OCR or watermarks.

Editing PDFs is a joy, with text boxes responding immediately to clicks and images moving around the page without a stutter. You can even tweak the character spacing and scaling – a product of Adobe’s position as the go-to for publishing professionals.

You can create a PDF from pretty much every format you care to name, as well as from your scanner, a web page or content in your clipboard. Likewise, exporting to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, JPEG, TIFF, PNG, HTML, RTF, TXT and XML takes just a few clicks.

Dig a little deeper and Adobe’s suitability for business use becomes abundantly clear. For instance, the Tracker tool lets you manage your PDF workflow, while a “Send for Comments” button allows you to type in an email address and ping off a file to a colleague or client, who doesn’t need an Adobe account.

Acrobat Pro’s OCR is outstanding, although enhancing pages and recognising text occasionally took longer than we’d like. It cleverly creates an on-the-fly font constructed from existing characters on the page, which meant we could create realistic-looking replacement text. The downside is when the characters aren’t there, Adobe uses an often clunky default instead.

Privacy-wise, you can set a password, “Remove Hidden Information” – such as metadata, comments, hidden text and overlapping objects – and encrypt PDFs with either a certificate or password. You can even pretend you’re a Cold War spy by compiling a “Security envelope” containing multiple documents.

So, after the best part of three decades, Acrobat Pro still leads the way, but it’s no longer alone: Nitro Pro and PDFelement are both notable – and cheaper – alternatives.

Less, the old cliché tells us, is more. We wouldn’t usually argue that a piece of software should have fewer features, but we’ll make an exception for Foxit: the interface is cluttered, with a migraine-inducing selection of tools behind its 13 tabs. That would be forgiveable, but we suspect this was behind our biggest problem with Foxit: crashing. While PDFelement, Nitro and Sejda often took a few minutes to complete the most strenuous tasks on our test PC, Foxit would often throw up its hands and promptly shut down in protest.

It’s frustrating because what Foxit does well, it does brilliantly. The Edit tab gives you all of the Word-style tweaks, along with extras such as inserting audio or video, re-flowing text and adding an “Article Box” to separate content on a page. The text edit function was responsive, as were the tools for tweaking images – you can clip, crop, shade, boost the opacity and shear to your heart’s content.

The conversion tools are equally thorough. Not only can you transform a PDF into an RTF, TXT, XML, HTML, JPEG, PNG, TIF or BMP file – as well as the Microsoft options – but you can create PDFs from the scanner, a web page, the clipboard or by combining existing files. If you want to start from scratch, there’s also a prominent “Blank” button. The Convert tab is home to a Preflight tool that checks your PDF for issues in the manner of an antivirus scanner, but, you guessed it, this repeatedly caused Foxit to crash for us.

Foxit’s pièce de résistance, though, is its OCR tool. When we threw the troublesome page from a 1981 copy of NME at it, the results, without any exaggeration, were jaw-dropping. As you can see from the screenshot above, Foxit also corrected the angle of a scan of a hand-printed, 18th century-style poster, recoloured it to make it more readable and made the text editable – with no mistakes.

A list of the remaining features would fill another article twice over, but highlights include a tool that reads your PDF aloud, three page-measurement tools, batch printing, PDF optimisation, tracked review emails, OneNote compatibility and Bates numbering.

When Foxit wrote “Everything in Acrobat at a fraction of the price”, it wasn’t joking: it has everything for a £146 one-off payment, compared to Adobe’s £181 annual subscription. Some of the features – such as its OCR – are phenomenal and could be worth the admission price alone, but far too many important tools caused Foxit to crash, leading to a reluctant three stars out of five.

Nitro Pro lives up to its name: for power users who want explosive performance, a hoard of features and well-executed basics, it’s up there with the best.

Installation takes a while, but that’s down to the breadth of features. These are organised into tabs that carry more than a whiff of Microsoft Word, and the large, orange-accented icons mean it’s easy to find what you need. Nitro’s emphasis on customisability is immediately clear too: you can add your most-used, or “favourite”, features to the toolbar via the button.

Nitro breezed through editing both our text and image-heavy test PDFs. After you click on them, text boxes flash and then become fully editable, and Nitro’s font recognition rivals that of PDFelement. You can easily tweak images’ brightness, contrast, colour, resolution and arrangement (“send to back/front”) too.

Document editing, conducted via the Page Layout tab, isn’t as user-friendly as in PDFelement or Seijda, but the insert, rotate, delete, watermark, Bates numbering and bookmark functions are all present and correct. We especially liked the “Auto De-Skew” option, which levels askew images in scans without user input.

In the Review tab, Nitro offers the ability to scribble freehand on a PDF – although, unless you have a very steady mouse, you’ll need a stylus. A nifty tool also brings up an onscreen ruler for measuring page elements, which will appeal to designers and perfectionists alike. Rounding off the jam-packed tab are a function for comparing two pages side-by-side and OCR. In our challenging 1981 NME test, the OCR made the text copyable and searchable, but on-page edits were beyond it.

One negative is a comparative dearth of sharing options: you can attach a PDF directly to an email or upload it to Nitro Cloud – and that’s it. Still, the batch processing (File | Batch Processing) helps to make up for that: you can convert, print and apply OCR to multiple PDFs at once, while creating a sequence takes frequently performed tasks out of your hands.

So should you download Nitro Pro or PDFelement? They’re both superb, but Nitro is better for those with a heavy workload, helping them to become lean, mean PDFing machines.

Unlike the other editors in this list, you can use Sejda for free indefinitely, but the caveats are numerous: you can only perform three tasks per day, can’t handle PDFs over 50MB or 200 pages in length, and can only convert documents one by one. That may work if you only do occasional editing, but most users would be better off with the paid-for version.

Sejda’s sleek interface condenses everything you’re likely to need into the All Tools dropdown menu, with a healthy selection to peruse. Our eye was drawn to the OCR capability, which works well. In our challenging ancient NME test, it gave us searchable, copyable text. Granted, it needed formatting when pasted into a Word doc, but that’s to be expected.

The file-compress function is similarly smooth. Depending on the size of the document, you’re presented with a screen indicating that “Your task is processing” for anywhere from a couple of seconds to a few minutes. In the latter scenario, Sejda compressed an image-heavy PDF of a magazine cover from 2.92MB to 411KB with no discernable impact on readability. Impressive stuff.

Sejda didn’t conduct image-heavy editing as successfully as PDFelement, with text on our test file popping out of alignment or changing colour when clicked, but those slight deficiencies are balanced out by practical, everyday tools such as digital signatures, “whiteout” (Tipp-Ex to us Brits), easy annotations, form creation and text replacement.

As well as the usual conversion to Word, TXT, JPG and Excel files, Sejda has a few more tricks up its sleeve: quickly turning a PDF greyscale will be a boon to users looking to save ink, while the ability to “flatten” a document à la Photoshop will seal in any edits. And there’s plenty to please small businesses here, with support for Bates numbering, watermarks, PDF unlocking and password protection. You can even use the software to repair a damaged or corrupted PDF, which may not be a common occurrence but is a neat fail-safe.

All of this makes Sejda an attractive proposition for individuals and small businesses. PDFelement is still the better upfront purchase, but keep in mind that Sejda’s rolling annual subscription ($63) provides access to the web-based PDF editor, which could be a clincher for users on Chromebooks or tablets.

It's becoming extremely difficult for companies to guarantee the security and integrity of their data, not least due to the increasing mobility of employees. Staff spend more time away from the office, accessing company documents from all over the world, often using their own devices.

The bring your own device' (BYOD) trend poses a major problem for company security. This was demonstrated by a study carried out by the Ponemon Institute in which 2,300 IT and security specialists from eight countries were surveyed. 58% of respondents consider BYOD to be a security risk, with experts claiming that the use of private mobile devices restricts the effectiveness of data protection measures and hampers the implementation of security policies.

Increased mobility combined with new opportunities for communicating and reproducing information, mean the risk of data loss for businesses rises. Even when printed out or simply distributed incorrectly, lists and documents can easily fall into the wrong hands or be deleted by employees accidentally or deliberately.

If development results, customer drafts, contracts or other confidential information fall into the wrong hands, it's not simply a competitive disadvantage for the company concerned. When data is lost or stolen, as well as affecting the company's reputation, it could also incur financial losses or make the organisation liable for heavy fines.

Not only is data becoming more mobile, it is also distributed more quickly and created in larger volumes. Around 90% of German companies that took part in a survey for Bitkom declared that the amount of data they were producing had increased in comparison with the previous year. On average, these companies were generating 22% more data.

Increased hardware costs are not the only consequence of this increase in data; the cost of protecting such information against unauthorised access, whether from inside or outside the company, is also increasing.

The consequences of data loss are becoming even more serious, and a study from the Ponemon Institute on the cost of data breaches revealed that over the past two years, costs incurred by companies due to data loss have increased throughout the world by 23% to an average of $3.8 million per security breach. Under the new GDPR regulations, companies could be fined 4% of their annual turnover or 20 million for failing to comply.

If documents contain personal information, many data protection regulations such as the European Data Protection Directive legislations also apply as well as GDPR. It must be possible to ensure that access, editing and distribution of information to third parties can be recorded and traced, and companies also have an obligation to ensure a level of security appropriate to the risk of a breach, such as encrypting documents to ensure that only authorised users can get access, and that no unnecessary personal data is included.

However, paper documents are not necessarily a way to protect against hacks or breaches. It could even be argued that the opposite is true once a paper document has left the printer, its journey from that point onward is difficult to control. It's impossible to know who might be able to read or copy it, and documents are at risk of being lost during transport or disposal.

Even if, in principle, it's easier to keep digital documents under greater control than printed documents, digital formats still represent a potential security risk for companies. Therefore, document security should be a central component of company security. According to the Ponemon Institute study, 72% of IT experts surveyed believe that document security can contribute to maintaining data confidentiality, integrity, authenticity and accessibility.

There are a number of different ways documents can be secured online at all stages of the workflow to ensure that data doesn't fall into the wrong hands, including using password protection to open and edit documents, protecting access at a project or group level and using encryption to ensure that protected files can't be read by unauthorised people, should they fall into the wrong hands.

In the world of IT, the year 2020 will be remembered for many things, and among them should be PDFs rise to prominence. Of course, to most professional, PDFs are nothing new, yet the surge towards remote working (stranding workers far from their office printers) has enforced unprecedented reliance on this arm of digitisation.

On the one hand, PDFs are a scalable, ready-made solution to facilitate remote working. On the other, they are a vulnerability, with greater amounts of sensitive, digital data created for cyber criminals to target.

Today the cost of a cyber breach reaches on average $3.86 million, a figure made more devastating by the uncertainty in which we find ourselves. And the damage doesn’t stop there. When sensitive information falls into the wrong hands, reputations will be tainted and customer loyalty lost, not to mention the consequences if data protection regulations are breached.

Every single PDF document a company generates, distributes, edits and stores must be carefully safeguarded. Fortunately, some PDF tools come with in-built security features. A good start, but with PDFs accessed from various devices, across systems, and at different stages of workflow, the enterprise must do more to ensure security.

On your journey to protecting your PDF documents, there are three key factors to consider.

Password protection

A good PDF solution will allow differentiated access for creating, editing, saving, printing and reading PDF documents. In terms of password protection, there are two levels that are necessary for a sufficient level of security: permission to open a document and permission to edit it.

Protecting the document against being opened is important if only a defined group of recipients is allowed to open it. One example is if confidential information is sent by email - in principle, anyone who gains access to the email can also read the document. However, if the document is secured with a password, only the actual intended recipient in possession of the correct password will be able to open it.

Permissions passwords play an important role, particularly when collaborating with internal or external co-workers, or when communicating with customers. For example, team members may be able to view, print out and add comments to a project plan, but should not be allowed to remove or add pages to it. Similarly, customers should be able to fill in forms and sign documents, but not to modify the text in any way.

It is possible with some PDF providers to go further and use encryption to ensure that protected files can't be read by unauthorised people. But there are potential problems to be aware of with encryption, including meeting various compliance standards, and whether the encryption can be recognised by older PDF applications.

Confidential information removal

In many circumstances, personal data should be removed before a document is circulated to protect it, in a process often referred to as redacting. It is not enough to simply put a black line across the information that should be concealed, as an experienced PDF user would easily be able to remove this line again. Instead, the information must actually be removed permanently. Redacting the section in question simply indicates that sensitive data has been removed, which is particularly relevant for authorities and other public bodies that are required by law to highlight where information has been removed.

All private companies have to handle personal information that is subject to data protection, and must not be passed on to third parties. The consequences for non-compliance under GDPR regulations are severe. Therefore, a PDF tool must be capable of permanently removing this information in a traceable way, including potentially revealing metadata and hidden information.

Certificate-based signatures

It is becoming increasingly common to sign documents with a digital ID, which approximately corresponds to a signature on a paper document. If unauthorised changes are made to a document after it has been signed, the digital signature becomes invalid.

Documents may be signed several times by different people. When deciding on a PDF tool, it's best to opt for an application that not only enables documents to be signed, but also to be stamped with a digitally-authenticated timestamp. This indicates that the contents of any data file haven't been changed since that time.

Digital IDs not only allow a PDF solution to authenticate documents, but also to protect them. This is a process known as certifying, which allows the owner of the document to apply a signature and document protection at the same time. The signee can completely lock the document, or allow certain actions to be available for others such as form filling or commenting.

There's not much that's more frustrating for your staff than trying to fill out an online document and finding they can't even highlight the text.

Whether it's speeding up train season ticket loan applications or making your last board minutes available to all employees, there's many advantages to going paperless, and only one of those is about costs.

As part of a comprehensive and integrated Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategy, organisations can stand out positively by providing compliant and accessible web pages and documents.

For staff with certain disabilities, barrier-free access to information is crucial, so accessibility should be at the top of your agenda. PDFs can help organisations offer this, looking the same no matter whether a worker is viewing the document on Windows, Mac, Linux or on the web. But you have to make sure your PDF is not only readable, but fully accessible.

For a PDF to be considered accessible, it must meet the following eight criteria:

1: Form fields must be accessible

Accessible PDF forms must contain fillable fields, as well as descriptions of these fields that can be read by a screen reading program. The fields must be called in a defined order using the tab key, so that people can fill out the form even if they are not able to use a mouse.

2: The document must contain text and must be searchable

A scanned paper document exists only as an image. Assistive systems cannot recognise it, and it also cannot be read aloud or presented in Braille. This type of file must therefore be converted into searchable text by an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) system. Normally, it is necessary to do some manual editing to correct recognition errors, and include additional information such as bookmarks or alternative text descriptions for graphics or images in the document.

3: The document structure is created using tags, which define a logical reading order

Accessible PDFs have a hierarchical structure, clearly identifying headings, paragraphs, tables and lists. The structure of these tags creates a logical reading flow that assistive tools can use.

4: All links, graphics and form fields have a descriptive text

Accessible PDF documents contain alternative texts that describe the content of elements such as charts, illustrations, graphics, images, form fields, footnotes and links. Screen readers and other assistive tools can read this information and provide the user with an idea of the represented content.

5: The language of the document is defined

Some screen reading devices can read documents in different languages, with the correct emphasis and pronunciation. To use this function, the document must contain information about the language in which it was written.

6: The PDF document contains navigational aids

Links, bookmarks, headings and tables of contents all allow users to locate specific parts of the document directly, rather than having to plough through the entire text to find the information they want.

7: The security settings are configured correctly

Accessible documents must not be restricted in such a way that assistive tools are unable to access them. For example, screen readers may not be able to access content in documents in which copying text is prohibited.

8: The fonts used should contain characters that can be read

All information in an accessible PDF document should be presented in a way that allows assistive tools to extract and interpret it correctly. If fonts with special characters that cannot be read correctly are used, screen reader software will not be able to read the content.

Main image: Bigstock

We want to honour and celebrate tech industry's products, services and people that stood out in 2013. Hosting a virtual awards ceremony, with entries solely voted for by you, the readers, is our way of doing just that.

Voting closed at the end of last year and we've now been through all your comments and the winners have been decided.

The entries were all high quality and the winners beat off stiff competition to earn their accolades. So without further a do, we are pleased to reveal the winners of our 2013 awards:

Hardware product of the year

Winner: Samsung Galaxy S4

Highly commended: Apple iPhone 5s

Software product of the year

Winner: Microsoft Office 365

Highly commended: Apple iOS 7

Cloud product/service of the year

Winner: Microsoft Office 365

Highly commended: Apple iCloud

Leader of the year

Winner: Kate Craig-Wood

Highly commended: Tim Cook

IT team of the year

Winner: British Airways

Highly commended: National Museums Scotland

IT project of the year

Winner: EE's 4G UK roll out

Highly commended: The University of Bristol's quantum computing research

Vendor of the year

Winner: Box

Highly commended: HP

Congratulations to all our winners. You'll receive your award and celebratory bottle of champage in the coming weeks - personally delivered by the team. Highly commended entrants will receive a certificate highlighting your achievements.

Check back on this page to find out what the winners have to say about their accolades and to find out more about the winning entries.

Software giant Adobe has confirmed that a software patch will be released this week to fix two security vulnerabilities in its Reader and Acrobat software.

As reported by IT Pro last week, security flaws were recently found in several versions of Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat that experts feared could be used to carry out targeted attacks on Mac and PC users.

Security vendor, FireEye, discovered the vulnerabilities and claimed they were already being exploited in the wild.

The vulnerabilities, which are identified as critical in a security advisory on Adobe's website, can cause applications to crash and puts the system at a higher risk for infiltration by attackers.

"Adobe is aware of reports that these vulnerabilities are being exploited in the wild in targeted attacks designed to trick Windows users into clicking on a malicious PDF file delivered in an email message," a section of the Adobe advisory read.

However, in a follow-up advisory published over the weekend, Adobe confirmed that it plans to roll out an update that will fix the security holes later this week.

In the meantime, Adobe has advised users to take proper security precautions until the updates are released. They have also been advised not to open PDF documents from unknown sources.

"Users of Adobe Reader XI and Acrobat XI for Windows can protect themselves from this exploit by enabling Protected View," the advisory added.

"To enable this setting, choose the 'Files from potentially unsafe locations' option under the Edit > Preferences > Security (Enhanced) menu," it continued.

Software giant Adobe is to overhaul its digital signing procedures after the discovery of two malware samples carrying the firm's digital certificate of approval.

The certificate's presence means the "malicious utilities" would have been treated as safe by end users' computers.

We believe the vast majority of users are not at risk.

In a blog post, confirming the discovery, Adobe said the malware had been traced back to a single source and that a "compromised build server" had been discovered with access to the firm's code signing infrastructure.

"We immediately decommissioned the existing Adobe code signing infrastructure and initiated a forensics investigation to determine how these signatures were created," said the blog post.

"We are proceeding with plans to revoke the certificate and publish updates for existing Adobe software signed using the impacted certificate."

The firm said signed samples of malware are often used in "highly targeted attacks", but said the "vast majority" of users were not at risk.

The software vendor has introduced an interim signing service, featuring an offline human verification stage, and revealed that it is working on a replacement system.

It will also be revoking all affected certificates, issued after 10 July 2012, on Thursday 4 October 2012.

Adobe has been hit by another zero-day vulnerability, which has already been picked up by hackers targeting Windows machines.

The U3D memory flaw affects Adobe Reader X and earlier versions for Windows and Mac, as well as Adobe Reader 9.4.6 and earlier 9.x versions for UNIX. Adobe Acrobat X and earlier versions for Windows and Mac are also affected.

"This vulnerability (CVE-2011-2462) could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system," the software maker said in a blog post.

"There are reports that the vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild in limited, targeted attacks against Adobe Reader 9.x on Windows."

Adobe said it is working on a fix, which will be ready "no later than the week of 12 December.

"Because Adobe Reader X Protected Mode and Adobe Acrobat X Protected View would prevent an exploit of this kind from executing, we are currently planning to address this issue in Adobe Reader X and Acrobat X for Windows with the next quarterly security update for Adobe Reader and Acrobat, currently scheduled for 10 January 2012," Adobe continued.

"We are planning to address this issue in Adobe Reader and Acrobat X and earlier versions for Macintosh as part of the next quarterly update scheduled for 10 January 2012. An update to address this issue in Adobe Reader 9.x for UNIX is planned for 10 January 2012."

Adobe software has been hit by a plethora of flaws in the past. One of the reasons the late Steve Jobs wished to distance Apple from Flash was because of security issues.

The software developer confirmed last month it was giving up on creating Flash for mobile browsers, punting for HTML5 instead.

The idea of being able to talk to a computer rather than type has long been a pipe dream, and not just for people who can't get to grips with a keyboard. Sadly, the technology has yet to reach a point where people can converse freely with a PC and have it understand what they're saying, but speech recognition for more mundane dictation purposes has been possible for quite a few years now. Nuance leads the field for desktop speech recognition and Dragon Dictate 2.0 is the latest version of its software for Mac OS X.

As the back of the Dragon Dictate 2.0 box points out, most people can talk much faster than they can type, but speech recognition isn't quite so quick to set up as just plugging in a keyboard. Automated telephone answering systems may be able to respond to a limited selection of spoken commands from just about any caller, but the speech recognition offered by Dragon Dictate is designed to recognise open-ended verbalisation for text transcription purposes, and so requires some initial voice training with the person using it.

Although speech recognition software employs a range of sophisticated audio, contextual and statistical analysis techniques to cope with homonyms and other tricky aspects of language, the basic idea involves matching elements of speech to the contents of a word database. By asking the user to speak the word "dog", for example, the software knows that whatever noise the user makes in response can always be interpreted as "dog" and displayed in type accordingly. This is where voice training comes reading on-screen text aloud so that the speech recognition software can get a measure of how a user says certain words, the cadence of their speech, and so on.

With this initial training out of the way, Dragon Dictate 2.0 can then turn speech into words within just about any application that would otherwise rely upon a cursor for input. The application runs in the background with just a floating status window to indicate its presence.

Dictation works extremely well. Best results are achieved with the clear, clipped and well-modulated vocal style of a TV newsreader, but Dragon Dictate is quite adept at dealing with less-than-perfect diction and nor is there any need to speak particularly slowly.

Dictation is as much of a skill as typing though, and maintaining a clear line of thought while simultaneously speaking it aloud takes practice pausing mid-sentence, or speaking in a halting way while an idea coalesces, is a recipe for poorly recognised speech. The need to verbalise all punctuation marks comma for example comma can also be a distraction open bracket try reading this sentence aloud to see how this works close bracket full stop. Punctuation can be ignored during dictation and then added later using the keyboard, of course, but that does rather defeat the point of speech recognition.

Vocabulary training can also be performed to extend the range of words that Dragon Dictate 2.0 knows about. The application already correctly recognises some technical terms such as "TCP/IP" and "DVD-ROM" without the need to specify capitalisation and punctuation. It can be further trained to identify more esoteric jargon by importing a suitable text document and performing voice training for the words that aren't in its database.

In addition to straight dictation, Dragon Dictate 2.0 can also be used for text editing, but the long list of specific phrases required for this (necessary to distinguish between dictation and spoken commands) make it a slow substitute for editing with the keyboard. Unfortunately, switching to the keyboard mid-dictation can cause more problems, since this puts a document's content out of sync with what Dragon Dictate 2.0 has recognised so far. This don't mix inputs' rule is spelled out in the manual, but the problem can be bypassed by uttering a command to rebuild the application's internal document cache after a keyboard edit to make it aware of the new, manually altered, structure.

That said, the option to create custom commands for anything from web bookmarks and menu selections, to text macros and AppleScripts, makes setting up a highly personalised voice-activated Mac OS X environment relatively straightforward although it requires no small amount of time and effort. Fortunately, there is a shortcut to this learning curve for voice-activated computer control voice-activated mouse control. Simply speaking "move mouse left, faster, stop, double-click" is as easy as it gets, but there's also the option to quickly select anything on any part of the screen using a pop-up grid overlay.

Dragon Dictate 2.0 is an impressive speech-recognition application that offers a prodigious amount of functionality for anyone who wants dictate text rather than type it, or use voice control rather than more traditional input methods. Its performance with minimal training is impressive too, but the best results are achieved after spending time and effort to master its intricacies which means it's no quick fix for anyone who hasn't the time or patience to master a mouse or keyboard.

The only real grumble is the price and Mac users are required to pay appreciably more for essentially the same software as Windows users. So, while Dragon NaturallySpeaking 11 Premium for Windows is available online for around 70 + VAT, the best online price for Dragon Dictate 2.0 for Mac OS X is around 109 + VAT. This is at least partially due to the fact that Dragon Dictate can't be bought (inexpensively) without a headset, something that is possible with NaturallySpeaking.

So what's our verdict?

Verdict

Impressive recognition performance and a vast array of features make Dragon Dictate 2.0 a flexible and highly capable speech recognition application for Mac users, but it’s a shame about the Mac OS price premium.

Processor: Intel processor

Operating system: Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard or later

Internet connection required for registration.

Nuance-approved USB microphone for Macintosh (included with boxed software).

Trojan-based attacks continue to be the biggest malware treat, a report from GFI Software has shown.

Trojans account for six of the top 10 malware threats of February and the report also confirmed the supremacy of Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT as the number one bug, growing from last month to 22.97 per cent of total detections.

Once in a user's system, these Trojans, associated with fake security programs, perform a scan of the computer and produce false warnings so that victims who take the bait buy malicious security software.

"These types of attacks notoriously cause a great deal of stress for the victim in addition to simply infecting their computer," said Chris Boyd, senior threat researcher at GFI Labs.

GFI Labs also pointed to the growth of other forms of malware, which tend to be harder to detect. Among those are PDF exploits, which have shown a small increase since January.

"PDF exploits continue to be problematic, showing a small increase since January. February has also seen continued use of fake Java applet installs to infect PCs with malware," Boyd said.

"With new attacks popping up every day, users need to always stay cautious and research programs they plan to download when there is any doubt."

He also pointed to infected videogame patches distributed on P2P networks and phishing attempts on popular retailer Play.com.

IT has to be usable, so that everyone from salespeople to data analysts can work effectively, without technology becoming a hindrance. With this in mind, CTOs look for very specific advantages from their IT investments: increased productivity, reduced costs of doing business, and competitive advantage; all delivered with the minimum of increased overhead in the IT department.

The emphasis for IT managers in midsize and enterprise organisations is therefore changing to meet an ever-more diverse range of business needs equipping desktop machines towards delivering a stable and economical platform. Members of IT departments must no longer see themselves solely as technicians, but as providers of business services.

Thinking of IT as a service provision has led to the development of exciting new models to deliver business functions to employees. Thanks to near-universal Internet connectivity, one alternative to the traditional purchase of hardware and licensing of software is the hosted solution. By buying in IT from third-party suppliers, large organisations can outsource IT management functions in the same way as they might, for example, outsource a call centre enjoying the reduced costs that such economies of scale present.

Instead of buying software licenses and hardware, and then employing IT staff to manage the infrastructure, the entire management function is bundled up into one manageable third-party arrangement. "The downsides are few and far between, as a result of the increases inInternet bandwidth. The capacity for business broadband is just enormous. Bandwidth is not a question; it's there now", says Mike Williams, Head of Application Strategy at hosting providers 7Global.

Analysts IDC predict a 32% annual growth in Online delivery of business applications (known as "Software as a Service") between now and 2011, and Microsoft is at the forefront. Infosys Consulting report that $2.4bn of Microsoft software will be delivered via hosted solutions in the next three years.

Click the link below to read the full report.

RIM has issued a fix for a serious security flaw in various versions of its BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES).

The BlackBerry manufacturer has not only issued patches for all affected versions, but offered a workaround for any administrators who were unable to download the fixes for whatever reason.

The buffer overflow vulnerability could cause the service to crash or allow for remote code execution.

"The issue relates to a known vulnerability in the PDF distiller component of the BlackBerry Attachment Service that affects how the BlackBerry Attachment Service processes PDF files," RIM noted in an advisory.

"Successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires a malicious individual to persuade a BlackBerry smartphone user to open a specially-crafted PDF file on a BlackBerry smartphone that is associated with a user account on a BlackBerry Enterprise Server."

The vulnerability was given a score of 9.3 out of 10 on the Common Vulnerability Scoring System - an industry open standard designed to show how severe a flaw is.

BES is the software organisations use to manage their BlackBerry deployments. It lets businesses coordinate operations such as messaging and calendar entries.

The flaw cannot affect BlackBerry devices directly, RIM said.

The affected software versions include:

BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express version 5.0.1 and 5.0.2 for Microsoft Exchange

BlackBerry Enterprise Server Express version 5.0.2 for IBM Lotus Domino

BlackBerry Enterprise Server versions 4.1.3 through 5.0.2 for Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Domino

BlackBerry Enterprise Server versions 4.1.3 through 5.0.1 for Novell GroupWise

BlackBerry Professional Software version 4.1.4 for Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Domino

The PDF format has a lot going for it. Attach one to an email and there's an extremely high chance that the recipient will be able to open it, the layout and formatting won't have fouled up and even without using password-protected permissions it's unlikely that anyone will change its contents.

When it comes to converting documents to PDF, there are plenty of free applications to choose from, most of which present themselves as a printer driver. At the other end of the scale is Adobe's pricey Acrobat Pro X, which is best described as a PDF-based workflow management tool.

Sitting between these two extremes is Nuance PDF Converter Professional. It too provides a printer driver for generating PDFs from any application, but it also installs plug-ins for one-click conversion from Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer alongside an application for editing PDFs.

PDF Converter Professional is priced much nearer to the free utilities than Acrobat Pro, but in terms of features, it has more in common with the latter. It's the little differences that add up, though; where Nuance and Adobe's software differs, Adobe invariably comes out on top.

For example, Nuance's plug-ins aren't as sophisticated as Adobe's. Exporting from Internet Explorer doesn't retain active links and insists on capturing whole web pages rather than just selected elements on a page. Nuance's Ribbon tab for Word lacks Adobe's ability to handle PDF mail merges, to import comments made on PDFs or to embed Flash animations.

Its Word, Excel and PowerPoint plug-ins include options to import a PDF and turn it into an editable document, though. Formatting was preserved reasonably well but seldom perfectly, and some pages were badly garbled. It's an interesting feature but not one we can imagine using regularly. It's no longer exclusive to Nuance, either Acrobat Pro X now converts PDFs to Excel and Word formats.

The main application is adorned with too many buttons that have cryptic-looking icons for our liking opting to show button labels (via the right click menu option) helps but the increased on-screen clutter really does require a high-resolution monitor for comfortable viewing. Basic tasks such as managing comments or inserting and deleting pages require yet more panels and buttons to be activated.

However, the steep learning curve eventually gives way to a comprehensive, efficient collection of tools. The range of editing, formatting and media-embedding options resemble a fully fledged DTP application, although it falls rather flat in this respect. However, when it comes to adding finishing touches to a PDF created elsewhere, it has all the bases covered.

There are also tools for designing interactive elements buttons, drop-down lists, text boxes and more and sophisticated options for programming their behaviour. There's nothing to rival Acrobat Pro's form distribution, tracking and analysis tools, though. A range of rich media files can be embedded into PDFs, including Flash and Silverlight animations, audio and video files, and even 3D objects in U3D format. It seems that the software doesn't keep track of which video formats are supported in the PDF specification, though some clips could be imported and saved as part of the PDF but wouldn't play in Adobe Reader X.

PDF Converter Professional 7 can also create Portfolios, which group multiple files together for distribution. The resulting file is still a PDF that opens in Reader 9 or X, but doing so reveals a graphical front end for browsing, previewing and extracting the files it contains. These needn't necessarily be PDFs. Any file can be included, and many can be previewed in situ, including Word and Excel documents, MP3s, Flash animations and Flash Videos with FLV extensions.

Unlike Acrobat Pro X's Portfolio templates, Nuance's software presents full-screen previews of Word and Excel files, complete with scrollbars and worksheet tabs to view the full document. PowerPoint files can be previewed too but a simple text animation proved too much for it, rendering half-way off the screen.

Nuance's Portfolios look considerably more utilitarian than Acrobat Pro's glossy designs. Embedded files are presented in a grid where a choice of colour schemes is the only effort towards aesthetics. We couldn't find an easy way to reorder files in the grid, as their order is defined by various criteria in a list view (we eventually found a workaround by creating a custom column called Order, numbering the files, sorting by Order and then hiding the column).

There's an option to design a welcome page, comprising an image and some text, but while it appeared when the PDF was opened in Nuance's software, there was no sign of it in Adobe Reader. However, while Nuance's Portfolios don't have the pizazz to woo a potential client, the straightforward, functional approach is ideal for sharing files with existing ones.

This workmanlike, slightly cumbersome implementation of Portfolios is typical of the package as a whole. There are surprisingly few features that it lacks compared to Acrobat Pro, although there are exceptions. The lack of CYMK colour support makes it unsuitable for professional printing tasks, and Google Docs is a much better low-cost option for online surveys if Acrobat Pro is deemed too expensive.

For other tasks PDF conversion and editing, Portfolio creation, managing comments and revisions while it isn't as polished as Acrobat Pro, it gets the job done. Our biggest frustration was that, in our tests at least, closing the Office plug-ins' or print driver's Preferences caused the host application to hang for up to a minute. It's certainly less than ideal, but as with many features in this software, the odd minute wasted here and there may be a price worth paying for a saving of almost 400.

Verdict

PDF Converter Professional 7 delivers on its promise to deliver a business-oriented PDF workflow at an accessible price. There are surprisingly few features in Acrobat Pro X that Nuance’s software lacks. Its implementation is less glossy and, at times, a little clunky, but Adobe’s far pricier software has some clunky moments of its own. We’d hesitate to recommend it for professional printing jobs, but with a few small exceptions such as its missing mail merge capabilities, it’s fit for purpose as a general-purpose business tool. However, we doubt whether most people will have either the time or patience to get to grips with its more advanced features.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS Processor: Intel Pentium III or faster Memory: 512MB (1GB recommended) Hard disk: 500MB free space OS: Windows XP (SP3), Vista (SP2), 7

Small businesses face many of the same internet threats that large enterprises have to contend with. One big difference is the available budget and manpower, with small companies struggling to afford even one member of staff with the sole responsibility of keeping computer systems safe.

One solution is to use systems management software, but this isn't cheaper either, and requires costly hardware. One of the many alternative solutions available is Trend Micro's new hosted security service that aims to provide small businesses with a low-cost and easy-to-use alternative. It does not even require a server.

We have looked at the ways you can use Trend Micro Worry-Free Business Security Services to lock down and manage the security of the computers in your office or even your home.

While Trojans and bots are the most prevalent forms of malware circulating the web, cyber criminals' use of rogue anti-virus software is steadily increasing.

So claims Sunbelt Software, which released its list of the top 10 malware threats in April. The rankings were largely unchanged from March apart from the entry of a loader for a rogue security product named SecurityTool.

The FraudTool.Win32.SecurityTool (v) threat took the final place in the top 10, removing Virtumonde from the list.

A recent report from Google claimed that fake anti-virus software now accounts for 15 per cent of all malware on the web.

"Trojans and bots are very prevalent. We also have an indication that rogue security products continue to spread," said Sunbelt Software research centre manager Tom Kelchner.

"In recent months many security researchers at antivirus companies have been noticing a slow but steady increase in rogue activity. It's becoming a very significant source of income for the bad guys," he added in a statement.

Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT was ranked as the most prevalent form of malware threat by Sunbelt, with a 33.74 share, far ahead of Exploit.PDF-JS.Gen in second place on 3.41 per cent.

Adobe Reader and Internet Explorer were the two most vulnerable programs as web-based attacks saw a dramatic increase in 2009, Symantec has revealed.

The security software maker's annual Internet Security Threat Report revealed that last year saw a 100 per cent rise in new malware year-on-year, with more than 240 million new malicious programs having been discovered. In addition, a new botnet-infected PC is discovered every 4.6 seconds.

The single most exploited vulnerability in 2009 was a hole in Microsoft's Windows SMB2, followed by vulnerabilities in Adobe's Reader and Flash Player, and issues with Internet Explorer 7.

The most popular method of attack was through PDF file downloads, which represented nearly half of all web-based attacks.

Symantec said that while Internet Explorer was the most vulnerable to attack, in many ways it was a victim of its own success. Indeed, the total of 45 reported vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer was less than a third of the 169 holes reported in Firefox.

"This shows that attacks on software are not necessarily based on the number of vulnerabilities in a piece of software, but on its market share and the availability of exploit code as well," the report read.

In addition, Symantec urged Apple to step up its efforts to combat the increasing number of threats targeting its Safari browser, with 94 new vulnerabilities having been discovered for the browser in 2009.

"It takes IE and Firefox less than a day of exposure before a patch is available, but it's about 13 days with Safari. Apple is going to have to catch up because that's quite a long time to be exposed," the company warned.

According to Symantec, hackers are increasingly using web browser plug-ins as a way into unsuspecting users' computers. It discovered 321 holes affecting browser plug-ins last year: 134 using ActiveX, 84 for Java SE and 49 for Adobe Reader. The figures actually represent a decline in the number of ActiveX holes, with the cross-platform nature of Java and Adobe Reader making them increasingly attractive to scammers.

Symantec put the significant increase in malicious software overall down to an increasingly organised and sophisticated underground market where criminals buy, sell and trade tools for putting together DIY online attacks. For example, the company found nearly 90,000 unique variations of the basic Zeus toolkit, available for as little as $700.

The US continues to lead the way as both the top country of attack origin and also the top country in terms of number of infected computers. China remained in second place, with Brazil emerging as a new malware hotspot in third place, illustrating a trend for hackers to increasingly base their operations in less developed countries, where laws and controls might be less well developed.

The steep rise in malware was driven largely by the growing popularity of easy to use toolkits that novice cyber criminals are using to turn out their own malware, said Tony Osborne, a technology manager for the public sector at Symantec.

Some of the kits were available for free, but others cost a lot of money, Osborne claimed. One, called Zeus, was available for around $700 (458) and many had become so successful that their creators now offer telephone support for those who cannot get them to work.

During 2009, Symnatec say more than 90,000 variants of the Zeus kit and it was responsible for the growth of one of the most prolific malware families during the year.

Zeus relies on spam to lure people to websites where victims will be tricked into installing malicious code or which sneaks on to a computer via a known vulnerability.

Often this can help criminals set up botnets - networks of hijacked home PCs that can be used to send spam or plundered for lucrative personal data, according to the report. In 2009, Symantec saw almost seven million distinct PCs that were members of botnets.

In this head to head we are focussing on the two most popular suites of office software on the market today. While some people consider the comparison a little one sided, we thought it was time to give Open Office a chance to stand up to the heavyweight that is Microsoft's 20-year old Office, in its latest beta incarnation.

Some may suggest this is a David and Goliath-esque battle as Open Office recently celebrated its 100 millionth download since version 3.0 was made available and Microsoft Office is believed to be used by more than 500 million people worldwide. But we have chosen these two big-hitters because of the wealth of support and features available. We'd also like to offer a nod to Google Docs, a suite we see as a potential contender for the future, when it will make up part of the upcoming Chrome OS.

While we recognise that many businesses might not be in a position to rip out and replace their previous Microsoft infrastructure, particularly if they've invested heavily in it over the years, the purpose of this comparison is to outline the key points in Office 2010 and Open Office's favour.

Smaller businesses with fewer tech assets and perhaps less legacy kit, those looking to set up a new department and trial something new before reporting back, for example, may be intrigued by open source alternatives to Office but not quite sure what's in it for them.

This comparison tries to answer those questions.

NB: At the time of review, Microsoft's Office 2010 suite was still in beta, but showcased the majority of the plus points the full version will offer. Following the review period, Open Office 3.2 was released offering a few more features that have not been compared or explored in this comparison due to the fact that the entire review compared version 3.1 and the Office 2010 beta in depth. Our intention is to compare the latest version of Open Office and Office 2010 again when the final Microsoft product is released later this year.

User interface

Both offerings have been lauded for their user interface (UI) in the past, albeit for different reasons and these incarnations aim to continue that trend.

Open Office too remains on a similar tack, with the pleasant addition of nicely designed new icons and a simple, no-nonsense interface relying on the tried and tested workspace design we became familiar with in earlier incarnations of Microsoft Office.

The simple design doesn't detract from the power and functionality of the software but does give Open Office the advantage of being more usable on low-end workstations or mobile systems.

Winner: Tie Microsoft's Office 2010 may boast a richer design but Open Office offers generally comparable basic functionality albeit with a less luxurious facade.

Usability

As we touched on previously, the length of time that Office has been in use afforded it huge advantage in its pre-2007 guises. Since then, post the re-design there have been complaints from some that they can't find what they want and are having to learn to use the suite almost from scratch again. Office 2010 is no different. It still uses the re-designed ribbon system (which is tweaked further in this release) and relies on the tabbed workspace rather than the older, more familiar context menus.

While this is one of Microsoft Office's biggest problems it has become one of Open Office's biggest boons. That tried and tested, not mended because it wasn't broken' interface that affords long-time users the productivity that they crave.

Other new features include the Paste preview' function and a much more polished version of its Web Apps service, offering users an extensive set of editing features on the road, via their web browser. So if your laptop breaks and you're stuck away from the office, you can use any internet caf to polish up that presentation or amend that spreadsheet. We feel these features are a great pitching point for Microsoft as they mark something of a confident stride towards the cloud, something business users are coming to rely on more and more.

Open Office, however, remains the basic, uncluttered suite of applications that it's always been. That said, this mustn't been seen as huge downside, as most users will be able to achieve what they need to with what's on offer. A noteworthy feature is Open Office's subscription to the International Organisation for Standardisation, which ensures its ability to read and write in other formats. Naturally this includes Microsoft's.

Whilst the omission of certain advanced features sets Open Office a few paces behind it needn't put off small business users, as the suite is readily available and can be installed very quickly on any broadband-enabled workstation. So being out of the office needn't affect your productivity with either offering.

Winner: Microsoft Office 2010 Although some may fail to see past the glamour and glitz, Office 2010 is a solidly built suite offering the modern business everything it needs in terms of functionality. It's a close call though and we fully expect Open Office to make more of a play for this title when future versions arrive with enhanced features.

Performance

We found both suites to be fairly resource friendly, surprisingly though Open Office weighed in with a heavier CPU footprint. For something lighter on features, this wasn't a welcome surprise.

We tested both suites on a machine running Windows 7 x64, with an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 and 4GB of RAM.

Open Office is the more nimble of the two, though this is hardly surprising as it lacks many the bells and whistles of its counterpart.

In terms of system requirements, Open Office strides ahead, demanding only 450MB of hard disk space over Microsoft Office's 3GB. This could prove to be a telling factor in laptop and ultra-mobile installations not to mention the ageing, stalwart computers which keep most offices ticking over to some extent whether we like to admit it or not.

Disk space aside, it's pleasing to see both sides paying attention to lower-end hardware. As any IT decision maker will attest, there are seldom more unpleasant words than hardware upgrade' and these applications will enable even the most basic office PCs to keep up with the times for a good while yet.

It's worth noting that speed is somewhat of a subjective matter. Not everyone will have the same level of horse power as our test unit and some will see greater results thanks to even beefier kit. But we have provided some examples as points of references.

When it comes to performance the pedigree of Microsoft Office shines through, with the 2010 suite opening its applications very swiftly. Word, for example, opened within a second. The open source competitor labours somewhat with its equivalent taking a leisurely 10 seconds to open up ready for use.

These times were reflected throughout the suite of applications with the exception of Outlook as, of course, Open Office doesn't include an email client although it does make for a good bedfellow with Mozilla's 'Thunderbird' and 'Lightening' for email and calendar. Both of which operate as quickly as Outlook.

We don't want to cast the aspersion that Open Office is a slacker though. It really is a stable and mature suite of applications, which represent great ideals and value. Just don't expect them to beat the hare, as they're more of a reliable old tortoise.

Winner: Open Office 3.1 Sun's product clearly excels here though this is to be expected based upon the open source philosophy behind the suite.

Installation and support

We've already outlined how easy it is to get hold of Open Office, provided you've got a web connection. Office 2010 is a slightly more involved affair, but still not very complex. You obviously need licences and as most businesses buy multi-user permits, this isn't something that's a known quantity as yet. Rolling out the suite across your PC estate should be as pain-free as it always has been provided you comply with the minimum hardware spec requirements (we've already noted that Office 2010 is lower-end hardware friendly).

If you're planning on rolling out Office 2010 as part of a standard hardware or OS upgrade anyway, you may be able to quickly and easily roll out the same image across your entire estate so you ensure users have Windows, Office and any other apps as standard. Things become a bit more complex if you try and do the same with Open Office et al.

Volume licensing when it comes to Microsoft products will generally involve a reseller or a third-party services organisation who has a good relationship with a business anyway, so should be able to offer more precise guidance on how long upgrading actually takes, in addition to ensuring licensing compliance and roll-out best practice. They key thing is to know how many licences you need as many businesses are still over buying just in case, which isn't very clever either in the current climate or when the economy is booming.

It's never nice when something goes wrong but quick and efficient support is a good tonic for the associated frustration. This is something you can expect across the board from Microsoft and its partners and the longevity of Office's service has led to a vast support network both from the manufacturer and across the web. IT departments shouldn't need a great deal of re-training to deal with the new suite and we expect existing training resources to remain useful.

So while support a plenty is on offer for both suites, it's the accountability aspect that will matter most to businesses. If you've employed a third-party to advise you and they provide bad advice or expose you to certain risks that could adversely affect either your industry reputation or customer perception, there is generally a way of protesting via the legal guys.

It's not so easy to try and do the same with the open source online advisors who give their time freely and where many openly profess they are enthusiasts rather than professionals. And if your head potentially rests on the corporate chopping block if things go wrong, sometimes it's much safer to take the easier option.

Winner: Microsoft Office 2010 There really is no substitute for solid, commercial support even if it does come at a price and Microsoft has become expert at delivering it.

Value

If support were a shoo in for Microsoft, one must assume that value will be a shoo in for Open Office, as it's open source and therefore free. But this contest isn't as clear-cut as it may appear. While Microsoft's Office 2010 will cost home users' 99 and business users 449 the value must be viewed as relative.

To a home or small business user, we would consider Open Office to be far and away better value as it offers all of the basic functions without the cost, but to business users the cost of Microsoft Office is heavily supported by its weighty feature set and extensive support networks.

Both suites are currently freely available to download online, although Microsoft Office is only free while it is in its beta testing period. The full release is expected to go on sale at the end of June this year.

There hasn't been any official comment on enterprise licensing prices but an interesting development is the suggestion of a monthly subscription fee to use the software. Again we've had no projections of the cost but the concept certainly has the potential to make upgrading a little less painful. There is something about Microsoft Office 2010 pay as you go' that leaves us a little unsettled though.

Open Office is and forever shall be free. Under the terms of its GNU licence you are free to use it on as many systems as you like, with the added bonus that if you are so inclined you're able to access the code and tailor the program in any way you see fit. The only caveat is, naturally, that you aren't permitted to profit from the software, which we see as fair enough.

Winner: Open Office 3.1 its widespread availability and good, solid basic features give Open Office the edge in this round, not to mention its open source driven cost or lack thereof.

Verdict

It's a tie. Although Microsoft’s baby comes out fighting here and nearly edges it. With its attractive, innovative design and richly supported feature set, the proprietary product represents the pinnacle of corporate functionality and while it remains the choice of so many current businesses it will continue to be adopted across the corporate world and the revenue it generates will fund further innovation and depth of support. It simply can’t be beaten for functionality and popularity, a feature that is so often the deciding factor in business. As we mentioned though, potential adopters would do well to sit and assess the realistic need for upgrade before making the jump. It’s owing to this fact that Open Office manages to get a look-in. For basic usability and value the suite represents a sensible choice for small business users who don’t want to sacrifice capability because of cost. The only investment you’ll need to roll this out across your entire office will be time and a little effort and we feel that this coupled with the stable, useful nature of Open Office entitles it to a joint place on the podium.

Adobe has been hit with a whammy of security issues, with Adobe Illustrator suffering a zero-day exploit and its Flash and Air software requiring patches for critical flaws.

Exploit code is available for the Illustrator vulnerability, with security firm Secunia confirming versions CS3 13.0.0 and CS4 14.0.0 are affected.

Hackers taking advantage of the exploit would be able to take over a user's computer if the victim opened a maliciously crafted Encapsulated Postscript File (.eps).

Adobe said it was investigating the issue, and would have an update when it had more information.

The company will also update its Flash Player and Air software next Tuesday due to critical security issues.

Updating Flash Player is not part of Adobe's regular patching cycle, which was intended to fix flaws in Adobe's PDF reader.

However, Mozilla has already made efforts to fix security problems in Flash, by warning users if Adobe Flash was out of date every time a new version of Firefox was downloaded.

Last week, F-Secure chief security officer Miko Hypponen said that Adobe needed to make moves to make sure that its popular plugin and add-on software was updated automatically.

It was a way for hackers to get through to computer users without having to deal with patched operating systems like Windows 7.

Hypponen said that Adobe Flash software users had on their systems was usually out of the date, and there needed to be a way that these were updated automatically.

He said at the time: "Most of them are not up to date. Microsoft can do this, so Adobe should be able to do this as well."

Adobe needs to find a way to make sure that all of the users of its software are updated automatically, according to a leading security researcher.

Mikko Hypponen, chief security researcher for F-Secure, said that users were not typically found vulnerable through their operating systems, but rather through plugins and add-ons found inside internet browsers.

This means software such as Adobe PDF Reader and Flash, Java or Quicktime. While Windows is updated automatically, these are still left unpatched and therefore vulnerable to new exploits.

This is especially dangerous as Adobe Flash has a bigger market share than even Windows, and Mac and Linux users often had it on their systems. Of these users, 80 per cent ran old Flash.

It is also problematic that users aren't required to click on a Flash or PDF file, as you can get infected by simply browsing a website.

"That's the way that attackers gain way, and if you look at the market share of things like Adobe Flash or the PDF reader plugin, they are huge," said Hyponnen.

"Most of them are not up to date. Microsoft can do this, so Adobe should be able to do this as well."

Security exploits against QuickTime plugins were also an issue, which users often didn't install but found in their systems.

"It's because I have an iPod," Hyponnen said. "And because I have an iPod I have to install iTunes. When I install it will, without asking me, install QuickTime automatically."

QuickTime automatically installs a plugin inside a web browser, which means that if there is a flaw, it could be exploited.

"I'm not concerned with updating QuickTime. I've never even installed it," he added.

Adobe had not responded to request for comment at the time of publication.

This is a versatile application, able to create PDF, Word, Excel and HTML documents directly. Although it handles basic character recognition well, in our experience, it's handling of page layouts is much less good. We'd therefore only recommend it for converting pages with comparatively simple designs.

Anybody who has a lot of paper documents to convert to electronic ones, needs Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Using a scanner to create an image of a page and then intelligent software to recognise the letters in that image is a lot quicker and cheaper than having them retyped. OCR software, such as Abbyy Finereader, is often bundled in slimmed-down form with scanners and all-in-one printers, but a full version offers many extras.

Abbyy started in Russia, but is now a well-known name for OCR in Europe and the US. FineReader 10 is the latest release of their flagship OCR product and boasts of being able to convert printed text or digital photos to PDF, Word, Excel and HTML documents.

Each of these options has its own particular use. Scanning to PDF provides the ability to archive documents in their text form, rather than the much bigger bitmap images of the same pages. They can also be made searchable, so people using an OCRed archive can take advantage of fast indexing.

Converting to Word documents makes the results completely editable, so if you need the information in the paper documents as the basis for revision or new work, this is a very direct conversion. Excel is useful for reproducing numerical tables, though of course formulae underlying the numbers will have to be recreated. Finally, converting to HTML is the ideal route if you want to add printed material to a Web site or intranet.

The program itself is remarkably simple to use and its main editing screen reflects this. A toolbar across the top offers large, easy-to-read icons for opening, scanning, reading and saving documents, while the main part of the screen shows two panels, the left-hand one for the bitmapped image either a scan or a photo and the right-hand one for the result of the OCR.

At the bottom is a magnified image of the bitmap page, which can be drawn up like a shutter, if needed, so spelling queries from the program can be checked against the original. On the extreme left is a column of thumbnails, so you can easily switch between pages in a multi-page document. With an Automatic Document Feeder on a scanner, multi-page documents can be scanned and OCRed as batch jobs.

Click on the Open icon to call up a file containing an image, either from a previous scan or from a photo, or the Scan icon to link directly to a scanner connected to the PC. The program then picks out the areas of the page which it sees as text and recreates them as frames containing live text in the right-hand panel. It also duplicates images of any bitmap data it can't see text in.

Our test system was originally connected to one of Kodak's latest ESP 5250 all-in-one printers, but we kept seeing internal scanning errors when trying to scan pages through FineReader 10 even though the same device scanned into PaintShop Pro without error. We switched printers to a Canon PIXMA MP640, which worked without problem.

The accuracy of Finereader 10 is good when recognising bulk text and we had near 100 percent correct translation to editable text. When it comes to formatting, though things aren't as good. We tried several different documents, from straight reports to multi-column newsletters and were disappointed with the reconstruction of layouts.

Headlines were reproduced in point sizes different from the originals, in some cases being put in text boxes which were too small, so the internal text was truncated. A column of text that in the original was justified, reproduced ranged right in the OCRed copy and Finereader 10 Professional used text boxes to reproduce columns in an original.

The use of text boxes may not seem a problem, as long as the format is preserved, but rival products, particularly OmniPage 16 Professional, are moving to the use of columns to handle columnar text, because it's so much easier to edit the result; columns can be linked, so text can flow from one to another.

Finereader 10 also had trouble with some coloured text, completely ignoring characters printed in orange in an original, even when we highlighted them manually as a text box. For comparison, this was again something OmniPage had no trouble with.

Finereader 10 Professional includes Adaptive Document Recognition Technology (ADRT), an ABBYY technology which the company claims recognises headings, headers and footers, page numbers and footnotes in multi-page documents. This might be of more use, if the program handled some of the layout basics better.

Verdict

This is a versatile application, able to create PDF, Word, Excel and HTML documents directly. Although it handles basic character recognition well, in our experience, it’s handling of page layouts is much less good. We’d therefore only recommend it for converting pages with comparatively simple designs.

Processor: 1GHz OS: Windows XP, Vista, 7, Server 2003 Memory: 512MB available Display: 1,024 x 768

Adobe has patched up 29 security holes in its Reader and Acrobat PDF-reading software in Windows, Mac and UNIX.

On the same day that Microsoft released a major patch, Adobe has brought out an update which fixes critical flaws that could have caused an application to crash and allow an attacker to take control of a system.

One of the updates fixes a flaw that Adobe reported had been targeted by "limited" attacks "in the wild". This was a heap overflow vulnerability that could have lead to code execution.

In addition, a remote exploitation issue specific to a Mozilla plug-in that could have lead an attacker to run code on a system with the privileges of the user.

Mozilla has recently tried to fix problems like these with a new Plug-in Finder Service that checks plug-ins on the Firefox browser.

Mozilla has previously put in a check for users to see whether the most recent version of Adobe Flash is being used by Firefox.

The number of exploits targeting flaws in PDF-reading software are now at an all time high.

The IBM's mid-year X-Force security report said that the amount of "veiled" exploits disclosed in the first half of 2009 were more than in the whole of 2008.

Adobe software has seen numerous patches and updates to fix flaws, while malware increasingly targets PDF software.

Senior technology specialist at IBM X-Force James Randell told IT PRO that there had been an "unusually" large number of attacks against systems that used documents that were deliberately "malformed". These took advantage of flaws in the PDF-reading software.

"It's a particularly interesting form of attack. It's where you have a document that basically has got embedded within it executable machine-language code," he said.

"What an attacker can do is if they construct the document in the right way, is make the reader trip over itself' internally and end up executing malicious code the attacker has embedded."

The code would then run with whatever security privilege the person using the reader had.

"If they were an administrator reading a technical manual and they opened it up, then the malicious code will run with a high level of privilege and potentially do a lot of damage," Randell said.

This form of attack used social engineering techniques, such as embedding the malicious document in a fake email and sending it to a target.

Research in Motion (RIM) has released details of multiple security vulnerabilities in the PDF distiller of some released versions of the BlackBerry Attachment Service.

The vulnerabilities could enable a criminal to send an email that contained a specially crafted PDF file, which could be opened to view on a BlackBerry smartphone.

This could cause memory corruption and even lead to an attacker taking control of a computer that hosts the BlackBerry attachment service.

RIM issued an interim software update resolving the flaw in affected versions of BlackBerry Enterprise Server and BlackBerry Professional software.

The update also contains fixes for two earlier similar vulnerabilities found in January, KB17118 and KB15766.

RIM recommended that BlackBerry users only open attachments from trusted sources as mobile best practice.

Adobe has issued a patch for a flaw in its Reader and Acrobat PDF software, weeks after the serious, already-exploited vulnerability was discovered but the fix is just for the latest versions.

The flaw crashes systems, letting hackers take control. Adobe has admitted that the flaw has already been used by hackers. Sourcefire researcher Lurene Grenier released her own fix just days after the vulnerability was discovered in mid-February.

Adobe yesterday posted updates for Adobe Reader 9.1 and Acrobat 9.1, fixing the flaw as well as a more serious "no-click" version of the vulnerability.

Anyone using older versions of both Reader and Acrobat will have to either upgrade to 9.1 or wait until 18 March, Adobe said. Unix users of Adobe Reader 9.1 will have to wait until 25 March for a fix.

As before, Adobe told such users to look to anti-virus for protection in the meantime. Click here to download the Adobe update.

The laser multifunction market continues to grow, as more and more businesses see the advantage of combining copying and printing functions in the same device, with scanning and faxing for good measure. Canon has a lot of multifunction machines in its range and the i-Sensys MF4690PL is at the high end of its latest batch of releases.

This machine has a comparatively small footprint, though it's deeper than most because of a strange design choice. Rather than having the control panel stick out the front of the machine, this one has it supported on two columns, which gives an overall effect of having a dark-grey cowl round the front of the machine. It makes it a bit more awkward to load the 250-sheet paper tray and a lot more difficult to use the 10-sheet multi-purpose tray, whose guides now reside some 100mm inside the cowl.

The Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) has a steeply raked feed tray, looking something like a shark's fin and it can take 35 pages for longer copy and fax jobs. The flatbed scanner can handle 24-bit colour at a maximum optical resolution of 600ppi, though with enhancement this reaches 9,600ppi.

Although the printer has plenty of functions, Canon has managed to keep the control panel commendably simple to use. The 2-line by 16-character LCD display is backlit, with three control buttons in front for navigating menus and three behind for mode selection. To the right is a fax number pad and to the left is a set of seven quick-dial numbers for frequently used recipients. The Start and Stop buttons are large and at the right-hand end of the panel and a series of controls, such as enlargement, brightness and document type, range along a silver panel at the back of the main controls.

There's a dual-purpose USB socket positioned under the control panel on the right, which enables scanning of documents directly to a USB drive as PDF files and printing or faxing of documents from a PDF.

Software provided with the i-Sensys MF4690PL includes PageManager and OmniPage, well respected applications for document management and OCR, respectively. There's also the CanonMF Toolbox, giving quick and easy access to e-mail, OCR scanning and the production of PDF documents.

The machine is a capable fax, as well as having print, copy and scan functions. Canon claims it can transmit a page in three seconds and it's based around a Super G3 fax modem, so can produce up to 256 greyscales. The MF4690PL also contains a 512-page fax memory, so should be able to cope with plenty of incoming faxes, even if the paper tray's empty.

Canon claims a top speed of 20ppm for this machine, but our five-page text and text and graphics tests produce speeds of 11.1ppm and 11.5ppm, barely half the speed. When we tried the 20-page document, we saw 15.4ppm, but you'd have to be printing a long document to reach 20ppm. The printer has automatic duplex, so we ran the 20-page document double-sided, too, producing 10 pages in 122 seconds, equivalent to 9.8ppm.

Copies of our text and graphics page took 13 seconds from the ADF and eight seconds from the flatbed glass. Both these times are excellent, making this machine a great little digital copier, from the speed point of view.

The quality of the pages the device produces is generally good, though there is some slight spatter around the serifs of text characters. Greyscale graphics are only fair, with some tints having a blotchy look to them and mid-greys showing a noticeable crosshatching. While in normal use, you probably wouldn't notice these attributes, there are laser printers and multifunctions at a similar price, which don't exhibit them.

A photocopy of our text and graphics page showed some deterioration in quality of greyscale reproduction, so that some lighter tints were virtually lost. Our test photo print, using the printer's dedicated photo setting, came out well, with good levels of detail and, curiously, less of the blotchiness than we noticed in the business graphics print.

The only consumable Canon quotes is a drum and toner cartridge which it refers to as a fax cartridge. This is a small unit, which slides deep into the interior of the printer section of the machine once you've hinged the scanner section up and opened a cover. The cartridge is rated as 2,000 pages, giving a cost per page from the cheapest source we could find (30 from www.printerinks.com) of 1.5p. This puts the i-Sensys MF4690PL in a reasonable position against its main competitors.

Verdict

This is a competent multifunction printer, particularly strong on print and fax, but not so good on copying, if that involves greyscale material. Running costs are reasonable and with only a single consumable maintenance costs should stay low. The slightly odd, front design can make feeding special media awkward.

600dpi, 20ppm A4 multifunction printer 250-sheet paper tray plus 10-sheet multi-purpose 35-sheet ADF for colour scans and mono copies Automatic duplex built-in USB 2 and Ethernet Presto! PageManager, OmniPage SE plus drivers

Business users have been warned that opening PDF files with their Blackberry devices could compromise their corporate network.

The flaw scored nine out of ten on Blackberry's common vulnerability scoring system and is seen as highly severe. RIM disclosed the vulnerability in an advisory, but so far a patch hasn't been released to deal with the problem, and no details have been given about how long it will take to deal with it.

The advisory said: "This issue has been escalated internally to our development team. No resolution time frame is currently available."

The vulnerability is specifically found in the PDF distiller of the BlackBerry Attachment Service.

A malicious user can take advantage by creating a specially made PDF file in an email message which can cause arbitrary code to execute on the device.

If the Blackberry user then views the PDF file while connected to the BlackBerry Enterprise Server of the corporate network, it can leave it open to attack.

The flaw is found on the BlackBerry Enterprise Server software version 4.1 Service Pack 3 (4.1.3) through 4.1 Service Pack 5 (4.1.5)

RIM has said: "In regard to the precautionary security advisory issued by RIM which informed customers about a potential vulnerability in BlackBerry Enterprise Server versions 4.1.3 through 4.1.5, there were no customer reports of any actual problems relating to this vulnerability and RIM has since provided software updates that resolve the issue."

It also said that the vulnerability does not exist in the newly released BlackBerry Enterprise Server 4.1.6 for Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Domino.

Read more on how smartphones like the BlackBerry as well as newer gadgets like the iPhone could be used safely on a corporate network.