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DiagonalZebra
Participant
February 27, 2022
Question

Required: termination of ALL background processes installed by Adobe

  • February 27, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 291 views

I have just taken a look at the virus-like spread of Adobe background processes that persist beyond exiting Creative Cloud and frankly, it's enough to make me consider reporting them as malware.  There is no conceivable legitimate reason why their software needs a presistent connection to IP addresses 54.167.222.166 and 52.31.19.200 (both port 443, both hosted by AWS) after termination of all applications.

 

Having seen this means that we'll finish the work that needs doing, and then we'll have to take a board decision if we are to continue with Adobe software or switch to Affinity and bought (web)fonts - we already discovered that Adobe Typekit is as much a privacy risk as Google Fonts (whose use has been made risky under EU privacy laws with the arguments used by the Austrian court earlier this month to ban the use of Google Analytics) so taking that extra step and removing malware in the process is not going to be that hard.  We already stripped everything Microsoft from core, so there's precedent.

 

Disappointing.

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1 reply

Tarun Saini
Community Manager
Tarun SainiCommunity Manager
Community Manager
February 28, 2022

Hi there,

 

Our team has created a self-explanatory document for Adobe background processes. Please check this article & let us know if that helps: https://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/global/adobe-background-processes.html

 

Regards,

Tarun

 

D
DiagonalZebraAuthor
Participant
February 28, 2022

Oh, it's good to know why it's all there, but it still offers no explanation why this persists when no Adobe software or resources such as fonts are in use.  For all we know those persistent network connections to two separate AWS buckets are exporting information, or maybe Adobe is using user systems for distributed bitcoin mining, who knows?  At least CC can be removed from login items, that's a good start.  One of the other issues is, for instance, the automatic upload to your cloud if left alone - depending on the work that's done this could be a GDPR breach because your cloud is in the US.  We've pointed it at an empty directory for now to prevent mistakes.

 

What you should document is how to disable all of it until such time as someone uses Adobe software and services - preferrably with one single command or even an option in the installer "only execute when CC is running" and make the cloud sync default to optional.  I understand that some facilities need to be deep in the system to integrate, but at least come up with an option to suspend or even halt them when no Adobe software is in use.  At the moment this has more the look and feel of APT malware.

 

While I'm at it, I would welcome a full uninstall-without-any-left-over-residue guide.  I would appreciate it if you could point me at it if it exists because once this project is done we'll need it.  I can restore from backup but zapping the individual elements is quicker..

 

Thanks for the explanation of what it all does already.

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