Foxit provided ZDNet this comment:
"Foxit takes every security concern seriously and we focus our engineering resources at determining the cause of the problem and coming up with a complete and safe solution. Upon hearing of a possible security concern, our development team went to work and a resolution was determined in less than 24 hours and an updated version of the Foxit Reader will be made public in the next 72 hours."
The problem results from the PDF reader software allowing executable files to be opened or launched from within the program, according to Conway. "Most users don't use that additional functionality," he said.
He suggested that PDF software firms could provide a "minimalistic" version of the PDF readers that do not allow other types of programs to be launched and allow users to decide which specific types of executables they want to be able to open within the program.