"There's no excuse for this," ranted someone identified as on a discussion board at Hacker News.

"Adobe Photoshop CS5.5 has a critical security vulnerability, but the remedy is forced PAID upgrade to CS6? Genius," said on Twitter Thursday.

Security experts were astounded that Adobe would stoop to such tactics.

"This is totally unbecoming of them," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Security, in an interview today via instant messaging. "For all that they have been doing to revise their face of security, this just brings them right back into the dunce cap seat."

"What a PR disaster," chimed in Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at U.K.-based Sophos, in a .