Tavis Ormandy , a Google Project Zero security researcher , has revealed Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability details about a new major vulnerability discovered Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability in Ghostscript , an interpreter for Adobe 's PostScript and PDF page description languages . Ghostscript is by far the most widely used solution of its kind . The Ghostscript interpreter is embedded in hundreds of software suites and coding libraries that allow desktop software and web servers to handle PostScript and PDF-based documents . Exploiting the bug Ormandy discovered Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability requires that an attacker sends a malformed PostScript , PDF , EPS , or XPS file to a victim . Once the file reaches the Ghostscript interpreter , the malicious code contained within will execute an attacker 's desired on that machine . The vulnerability , which has not received a CVE Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability identifier just yet , allows an attacker to take over applications and servers that use vulnerable versions of Ghostscript . At the time of writing , there is no fix available Vulnerability-related.PatchVulnerability . By far , the most affected projects are the ImageMagick image processing library , but also many Linux distros where this library ships by default . RedHat and Ubuntu have already confirmed they are affected , according to a CERT/CC security advisory released today . `` I * strongly * suggest that [ Linux ] distributions start disabling PS , EPS , PDF and XPS coders in [ ImageMagick 's ] policy.xml by default , '' Ormandy said . Because of Ghostscript 's broad adoption in the web dev and software dev communities , Ormandy has had his eyes set on Ghostscript for the past few years . He discovered Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability similar high severity issues affecting Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability Ghostscript in 2016 and again in 2017 . The vulnerability he found Vulnerability-related.DiscoverVulnerability in 2017 —CVE-2017-8291— was adopted by North Korean hackers , who used it to break into South Korean cryptocurrency exchanges , steal funds , and later plant false flags in an attempt to pin the hacks on Chinese-speaking threat actors . Because of Ghostscript 's wide adoption , any bugs , and especially those that lead to remote code execution , are highly sought-after by any threat actor .