Luckydog asked if the headline was wrong.
The problem is a buffer overflow. This means that the program had reserved a specific amount of memory to hold a certain piece of data. This reserved area is called a buffer. The article does not specify what piece of data the overflow was for.
For all we know, it could have been for the author of the document. Lets imagine Adobe allowed 100 characters (bytes) for the authors name. The program is supposed to enforce the 100 character limit; if somebody tries to put in more than that, the program is supposed to prevent it. But sometimes the program isn't written correctly, and the extra data is allowed into memory. If it's accidental, the program will just crash. But if the extra "data" is an attack, consisting of carefully crafted instructions, the computer will obey the instructions and do all kinds of nasty thing that the computer owner doesn't want to happen.
Knowing it's a buffer overflow attack doesn't tell us which part of the program (from a user point of view) the problem occurs in.
There's no reason to think the buffer overflow attack is directly related to printing the correct page sizes. Chances are, there were a bunch of changes in the latest upgrade. One change was fixing the buffer overflow vulnerability, and another change messed up the printing of different page sizes. |
