Adobe Rushes Out Emergency Patches For Critical Bugs

Engineers at Adobe Systems have been busy after the company released patches to plug 17 critical security holes affecting Adobe Reader and Acrobat.

Zero Day Vulnerability

Among the fixes is a patch for a zero-day vulnerability that impacted not only Reader and Acrobat, but versions of Adobe Flash Player as well, on multiple operating systems. Earlier in June, attackers were seen using the bug to plant backdoor Trojans on vulnerable machines.

Also among the bevy of patches is a fix for a situation demonstrated by security researcher Didier Stevens earlier in 2010, in which a PDF reader’s “/launch” command could be abused to run malicious embedded executables.

“[The June 29] update includes changes to resolve the misuse of this command,” blogged Steve Gottwals, group product manager for Adobe Reader. “We added functionality to block any attempts to launch an executable or other harmful objects by default. We also altered the way the existing warning dialog works to thwart the known social engineering attacks.”

When the feature is enabled, the user will get a warning message when opening attachments.

Open To Hackers

Almost all the vulnerabilities are known to leave users open to arbitrary code execution. The one exception is CVE-2010-2204, a remote memory corruption vulnerability that can cause programs to crash.

According to Adobe, arbitrary code execution has not been demonstrated, but may be possible.

Brian Prince eWEEK USA 2014. Ziff Davis Enterprise Inc. All Rights Reserved

Recent Posts

UK’s CMA Readies Cloud Sector “Behavioural” Remedies – Report

Targetting AWS, Microsoft? British competition regulator soon to announce “behavioural” remedies for cloud sector

15 hours ago

Former Policy Boss At X Nick Pickles, Joins Sam Altman Venture

Move to Elon Musk rival. Former senior executive at X joins Sam Altman's venture formerly…

17 hours ago

Bitcoin Rises Above $96,000 Amid Trump Optimism

Bitcoin price rises towards $100,000, amid investor optimism of friendlier US regulatory landscape under Donald…

19 hours ago

FTX Co-Founder Gary Wang Spared Prison

Judge Kaplan praises former FTX CTO Gary Wang for his co-operation against Sam Bankman-Fried during…

20 hours ago