In a January 12 report forwarded by Abode Systems, the company confirmed that the earlier-this-month cyberattack that hit its corporate network was linked to the all-encompassing attacks that Google recently mentioned as one reason for its plans to dump China.

While the Abode report noted that the company had uncovered a "coordinated attack against corporate network systems managed by Adobe and other companies," Wiebke Lips, senior manager of corporate communications at Abode, elaborated: "We are still in the process of conducting our investigation into the incident. It appears that this incident and the one Google announced earlier are related."

As per a company blog, Adobe became aware of the cyber-attack on January 2, and has been establishing communication with other companies hit by similar attacks; with investigations currently being underway in all the cases.

Abode's recent report of the attacks comes close on the heels of Google's announcement that the cyber-attacks were aimed at accessing Gmail accounts of human rights activists. Both Google and Adobe have conceded that the attacks can be termed as "sophisticated"; with Google also adding that it believed the attacks started off from China.

In the opinion of a majority of researchers, the underlying basis of the recent cyber-attacks against both Abode as well as Google largely was the malicious PDFs that managed to exploit a lately
-patched vulnerability in the popular Reader software from Abode.