Indeed, I’ve been infected by PDF-based viruses more than once. Updating Acrobat and turning off JavaScript in PDFs isn’t enough to keep you safe, either; I finally added NoScript to Firefox in order to prevent any PDFs from being displayed without an extra enabling click, so that only PDFs I trust are ever downloaded.
Of course, this has little relevance to scientific papers: the PDFs that you need to worry about are the ones that you never intended to download in the first place, that are downloaded in the background via JavaScript or an iframe embedded in an ad on a random webpage. (I once caught one from Kaj Sotala’s LiveJournal page, for example… just visiting the page was enough to infect my machine.)
PDF viruses exist.
Indeed, I’ve been infected by PDF-based viruses more than once. Updating Acrobat and turning off JavaScript in PDFs isn’t enough to keep you safe, either; I finally added NoScript to Firefox in order to prevent any PDFs from being displayed without an extra enabling click, so that only PDFs I trust are ever downloaded.
Of course, this has little relevance to scientific papers: the PDFs that you need to worry about are the ones that you never intended to download in the first place, that are downloaded in the background via JavaScript or an iframe embedded in an ad on a random webpage. (I once caught one from Kaj Sotala’s LiveJournal page, for example… just visiting the page was enough to infect my machine.)