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Officially known as Adobe Systems, Adobe is an American software company known for its multimedia and creativity software products. Popular products include Photoshop, Acrobat Reader, and Creative Cloud.
Headquartered in San Jose, California, the company was founded in 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke. The name comes from Adobe Creek in California, which ran behind the houses of the company’s founders.
One of the company’s first products was digital fonts, with the company entering the consumer software market in the 1980s. Adobe Illustrator was the company’s first consumer product, which was a vector-based drawing program for Mac.
Photoshop, Adobe’s flagship product, hit the market in 1989. The company followed up this software hit with its Adobe Acrobat and Reader software. PDF is now an International Standard.
What is included in the Creative Cloud?
The Adobe Creative Cloud is a Software as a service (SaaS) package that grants access to a wide range of creative tools, depending on the subscription.
Photoshop is the best-known product in the lineup, and the industry standard for image editing, but the Creative Cloud also includes Premiere Pro, After Effects, Illustrator, Acrobat, Lightroom and InDesign.
Users also have access to products such as fonts and stock images and assets.
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How many users were exposed in the Adobe mega data breach?
In 2013, Adobe was rocked by a huge data breach. The company admitted that 38 million active users had been exposed – far more than the initially reported 2.9 million – with the attackers having obtained access to their IDs and encrypted passwords. The hackers also managed to make off with part of the source code for Photoshop.
Then in 2019, Adobe servers were once again hacked, revealing sensitive information for 7.5 million customers, including email addresses and subscription status. No financial information or passwords were taken but this created a serious phishing risk for users.
