As part of its regularly scheduled quarterly security updates, Adobe patches its Reader, Acrobat, Shockwave and Flash products.
Adobe released five security bulletins
as part of its quarterly security update. Three are rated "critical"
and two "important."
Adobe fixed 11 vulnerabilities in Adobe
Reader as part of its quarterly update released June 14. The company also
resolved 24 vulnerabilities in its Shockwave Player and another serious flaw in
Flash Player. The Flash Player bug could cause a crash and allow an attacker to
take complete control of a system, Adobe said in its announcement.
"These vulnerabilities could allow an
attacker, who successfully exploits these vulnerabilities, to run malicious
code on the affected system," Adobe said.
Adobe patched Adobe
Reader X and Acrobat X for Windows and Mac
(APSB11-16), corresponding fixes in 8.x and 9.x versions, Shockwave Player for
Windows and Mac (APSB11-17), and Flash Player (APSB11-18) for Windows, Mac OS
X, Linux and Solaris. An updated version of the Flash Player for Android is
expected later in the week, Adobe said. Important vulnerabilities in ColdFusion
(APSB11-14), LiveCycle Data Services, LiveCycle ES and Blaze DS (APSB11-15)
were also closed for Windows, Mac OS X and Unix versions.
"Some of these fixes have been a long
wait for administrators," said Jason Miller, manager of research and
development at VMware.
Several of the zero-day vulnerabilities
that were resolved in Adobe Reader X in this update were addressed for 8.x and
9.x versions in March and April. Adobe had chosen to not update Reader X at the
time because the sandbox technology in the latest version trapped the exploits
and prevented them from executing. The vulnerabilities were exploited in the
wild against older versions while Reader X remained unpatched, Miller said.
"Throughout 2010 malware developers
have heavily exploited weakness in both Flash and especially PDF technologies,"
McAfee Labs found in its Q4 2010 Threats Report. As a result, administrators
should prioritize Adobe patches, McAfee said.
Adobe added Protected View, the sandbox
technology present in Reader X and Acrobat X with this update, Joel Geraci,
Acrobat technical evangelist at Adobe, wrote on the IT Matters blog. "Just like
Reader, Acrobat strictly confines the execution environment of untrusted PDF
files and the processes they invoke," Geraci said.
Adobe also enhanced Reader and Acrobat
X with the auto-update capability. Adobe added an updater utility a year ago that
resulted in users installing the updates "roughly three times faster than
before," Steve Gottwals, group product manager of Adobe Reader, wrote on the
Reader blog. The latest versions of Reader and Acrobat X now have a fully automated
capability so that the software can be updated without user intervention,
Gottwals said.
"The vast majority of attacks we are
seeing are exploiting software installations that are not current with the
latest security updates," Bard Arkin, senior director of product security and
privacy at Adobe, wrote on the Adobe Secure software Engineering Team blog.
Administrators will need to consider
the large Patch Tuesday release from Microsoft when prioritizing the patching
schedule. "The combo MS11-050/052, together with APSB11-016 from Adobe and Java
CPU June 2011, is the first highest priority set of vulnerabilities to address
this week," Wolfgang Kandek, the CTO of Qualys, said.
VMware's Miller said the update often
accompanies a trickle of updates from third-party software makers who have Flash
embedded in their products. An example would be Google's Chrome Web browser
because Flash is bundled inside the software.
Separately, Adobe issued updates for
its iPad apps that integrate with Photoshop. The three apps-Adobe Nav, Adobe
Color Lava and Adobe Eazel-were originally launched in May. They were revised
and updated with new features, Adobe said.
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