Adobe Systems Breach of Security?

[James Burke]

Did anybody else get this email today? The email address appears legit, but I did not follow any of the links. I can't find anything about it on Adobe's web site, so I'm a little suspicious even though it looks plausible.


Jim


UPDATE 8:07 am 10/4/13: Yep it's legit. It's under the "updates" section on their home page. I hope they're creative about fixing this cloudy mess.



Important Customer Security Alert
To view this message in a language other than English, please click here.

We recently discovered that attackers illegally entered our network. The attackers may have obtained access to your Adobe ID and encrypted password. We currently have no indication that there has been unauthorized activity on your account. If you have placed an order with us, information such as your name, encrypted payment card number, and card expiration date also may have been accessed. We do not believe any decrypted card numbers were removed from our systems.

To prevent unauthorized access to your account, we have reset your password. Please visit www.adobe.com/go/passwordreset to create a new password. We recommend that you also change your password on any website where you use the same user ID or password. As always, please be cautious when responding to any email seeking your personal information.

We also recommend that you monitor your account for incidents of fraud and identity theft, including regularly reviewing your account statements and monitoring credit reports. If you discover any suspicious or unusual activity on your account or suspect identity theft or fraud, you should report it immediately to your bank. You will be receiving a letter from us shortly that provides more information on this matter.

We deeply regret any inconvenience this may cause you. We value the trust of our customers and we will work aggressively to prevent these types of events from occurring in the future. If you have questions, you can learn more by visiting our Customer Alert page, which you will find here.

Adobe Customer Care

 

[James Burke]

Sounds phishy to me...... I would hope Adobe has proper security and encryption in place so this type of thing doesn't happen?

Corel probably hired some hackers to send these out so people would get scared and switch over to a non-subscription based program. :ROFLMAO:

If you check your bank account and find that somebody has ordered ten copies of Corel X6, then you should be worried.

In the meanwhile, the threat is truly legit. I went to Adobe's home page to verify (because I never follow links in an email...even if it looks "official").



JB

 

[HDvinyl]

http://money.cnn.com/2013/10/03/technology/security/adobe-hack/index.html?hpt=hp_t3

 

[SignManiac]

All over google news yesterday on the tech page. Adobe was hacked and a lot of user info was divulged.

 

[particleman]

This is pretty damaging to Adobe's Cloud program as everyone that is using it just had their account compromised. It is also reasonable to assume even though the passwords and credit card information is encrypted that the encryption keys/scheme might also be compromised. This is pretty evident by the warning to change your password and monitor your bank account mentioned in the email. 3 million up to date username/password combinations and CC #s are going to be of huge value to hackers. Just another suggestion if you use the same username/password on other sites you should also change the password.

 

[HDvinyl]

Maybe this is the reason some people steal the software instead of purchasing it??

:Oops:I do not believe in stealing.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

This is pretty damaging to Adobe's Cloud program as everyone that is using it just had their account compromised. It is also reasonable to assume even though the passwords and credit card information is encrypted that the encryption keys/scheme might also be compromised. This is pretty evident by the warning to change your password and monitor your bank account mentioned in the email. 3 million up to date username/password combinations and CC #s are going to be of huge value to hackers. Just another suggestion if you use the same username/password on other sites you should also change the password.

This is a very real threat to any program that uses a cloud based system. No matter how much they try to downplay this and they might be able to plug the door that hackers used this time, but that doesn't mean that they won't be able to find another.

Although, I am surprised by one sentence in the article that was posted:

The hackers also took source code for a number of Adobe products, Arkin said.

I have to wonder what source code was doing on public servers.

 

[James Burke]

They mention source code was stolen, but what about customers project files that were also stored on the cloud?


JB

 

[WildWestDesigns]

They mention source code was stolen, but what about customers project files that were also stored on the cloud?


JB

A very real possibility of happening even more so that Adobe was hacked. It's one thing to speculate about the theoretical dangers of a cloud based system, but once something like this happens, the other dangers are increased.

 

[SignTeam.us]

I received the email from Adobe at 1:07 am.

 

[John Butto]

Hopefully Adobe will go back to the old way of doing business with the hard copies and downloads. It made them millions with that business blueprint. I will not go the cloud route and will remain with CS6. If they, Adobe, do not change back will just jump on the Corel wagon as soon as they write code for the Mac OS.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

Hopefully Adobe will go back to the old way of doing business with the hard copies and downloads. It made them millions with that business blueprint. I will not go the cloud route and will remain with CS6. If they, Adobe, do not change back will just jump on the Corel wagon as soon as they write code for the Mac OS.

They did at one time. Sales from what I heard were pretty abysmal. I also think that certainly at this point, Adobe is too entrenched in the Mac world that it would be hard to penetrate that market, at least in a short term. Now, if the cloud is really hit hard, then that might help with things.

 

[MikePro]

another major reason I will never go to the cloud... CS6 4 life (well, at least the next 4+ years)

 

[The Vector Doctor]

Cloud or no-cloud this should not matter? They had a breach of personal info. If you have an adobe.com login then you could be affected. I don't recall if older versions of the software require setting up an account through them.

AFAIK nowhere does it say this for cloud customers only. I paid with a credit card when I got cs5 directly from Adobe several years ago. So i guess you should not assume you are immune unless you got your software from another source

 

[WildWestDesigns]

Cloud or no-cloud this should not matter? They had a breach of personal info. If you have an adobe.com login then you could be affected. I don't recall if older versions of the software require setting up an account through them.

AFAIK nowhere does it say this for cloud customers only. I paid with a credit card when I got cs5 directly from Adobe several years ago. So i guess you should not assume you are immune unless you got your software from another source

If I recall correctly, they didn't start requiring you to have a username/password til 5.5 regardless if you bought from them or not. Now they might have required you to create when if you had a service ticket for something. I always went thru a vendor, so I don't have an account with Adobe.

But you are right, this would affect anyone that has an account with them.

 

[royster13]

Adobe is too entrenched in the Mac world that it would be hard to penetrate that market, at least in a short term.

IMO and I have known to be wrong....Adobe will abandon Mac versions.....Many small businesses are taking a DIY approach and buying Illustrator to use on the PCs they already have......

 

[WildWestDesigns]

IMO and I have known to be wrong....Adobe will abandon Mac versions.....Many small businesses are taking a DIY approach and buying Illustrator to use on the PCs they already have......

That could be possible, but that would be (at least in my opinion) a bit on the dangerous side for Adobe to do that.

 

[Techman]

That could be possible, but that would be (at least in my opinion) a bit on the dangerous side for Adobe to do that.

Dangerous?????

Just wait until the next quarterly report comes out. The last one had some bad news. If the next one does there will be some serious changes.
Revenue for the period through August declined 7.9 percent even though the cloud services grew..

They are offering photoshop and lightroom for 9.99. However their projections include a nice price hike in the future. How can we know. Their code words are... projections show a growth in income once the cloud market matures.

 

[WildWestDesigns]

Dangerous?????

Just wait until the next quarterly report comes out. The last one had some bad news. If the next one does there will be some serious changes.
Revenue for the period through August declined 7.9 percent even though the cloud services grew..

They are offering photoshop and lightroom for 9.99. However their projections include a nice price hike in the future. How can we know. Their code words are... projections show a growth in income once the cloud market matures.

That's bad, but the fallout of the decision to eliminate support for the Mac OS would be far more instantaneous then the subscription based plan. If they choose to abandon the Mac OS.

What your talking about could be "ridden out" if they have enough patience/money/product offering to do so. If they choose to eliminate Mac support, your looking at a lot of people (especially those that are already on the cloud) will have to go to Windows either virtually or all out and I don't think a lot of them will like having to do that in order to keep Adobe on their computers.

 

[The Vector Doctor]

Yeah I don't see that happening. There is a blog from a Photoshop guy at Adobe and he says Mac/Windows share is about 50/50 on photoshop. I have seen other reports that it is 75pc/25apple. Cannot comment on other software. So despite PC computers having a superior marketshare, the software side is not so far apart. I think too in the video software department the share is not as lopsided either.

If you were in trouble why would you abandon that many users? The same was said a few years ago when Jobs publicly bashed and eliminated flash from all their mobile devices. Many said this would incense Adobe and they would stop Mac development

 

[Bobby H]

Adobe isn't going to abandon the Mac platform unless the executives at Apple do something stupid enough to give Adobe a very good reason to do so.

Make no mistake about it, Adobe absolutely is one of the companies that made owning a Mac a must for graphics work back when the desktop publishing revolution first started in the late 1980s. Apple didn't create tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, Freehand, PageMaker, QuarkXpress, LivePicture and others which made the Mac the dominant platform for print graphics work. Apple owes a lot of its success, particularly its prestigious "halo" of cool due to the applications from Adobe.

For the past decade Apple has shown pretty much nothing but animosity toward Adobe. It's campaign against Flash and positioning of apps like Aperture and Final Cut Studio smeared Adobe's brand image and cut into its market segments. I rolled my eyes at Apple fans who cheered Aperture as being a "Photoshop killer," blindly ignoring the fact Photoshop helped sell a lot of Mac towers over the past 25 years. Today, Adobe Lightroom happily dominates Aperture even on the Mac platform.

In recent years Adobe has shown some preference for the Windows platform over Mac OSX. They released the first 64-bit version of Photoshop only for Windows. Certain elements of the video oriented Production Studio Suite, such as On Location, were launched first on Windows.

Adobe has been poaching video industry customers from Apple lately, largely from the huge mistakes Apple made with the release of Final Cut X. Prior to the FCP X debacle Adobe had a very tough time trying to sell Premiere Pro to any Mac users.

With Steve Jobs being gone I can see Apple lightening up a bit and perhaps being a little more friendly to developers such as Adobe. But if Tim Cook and others take a zero sum game attitude and direct it at Adobe (as Steve Jobs did in the past) by releasing products that directly challenge Adobe's core applications (Photoshop, Acrobat, Illustrator, InDesign) Adobe could indeed pull the plug on Mac support as a means of counter-attack.