Foxit PDF eliminates 50 security vulnerabilities

The free Foxit PDF Reader is available in the new version 2024.1 for Windows and macOS. There are also corresponding updates for the premium Foxit PDF Editor, one of the best PDF editors we’ve tested. Foxit Software has closed 50 security vulnerabilities in both versions, most of which are classified as high risk. There are currently no known attacks that would exploit one of the vulnerabilities.

According to Foxit Security Bulletins from March 5, all Reader versions up to and including 2023.3 are vulnerable – for both Windows and macOS. In the case of Foxit PDF Editor, older versions of generations 13.x, 12.x, 11.x and 10.x are also affected. The majority of the vulnerabilities can be exploited with prepared PDF files to inject and execute arbitrary code. Significantly fewer vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Mac versions than in the Windows software. However, the risk potential is still high.

Foxit PDF Reader (formerly Foxit Reader) is considered a comparatively lean alternative to Adobe Acrobat Reader. As the range of features of Foxit Reader has also continued to grow (partly due to plug-ins supplied), this is only true to a limited extent: the download now comprises more than 140 MBytes. To quickly read a simple PDF file, the PDF viewers now built into most web browsers (such as Chrome, Edge, Firefox) are usually sufficient. The open-source Sumatra PDF can still be considered a really lean and portable alternative: The download is only just under 8 MBytes in size.