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Adobe released a patch addressing vulnerabilities in its ColdFusion Web application development platform. However, it still has not released a fix for the critical vulnerability in Adobe Reader and Acrobat that the company promised last week.
The vulnerability exists in ColdFusion versions 9.01, 9.0, 8.0.1 and 8.0 running on Windows, Mac OS X and Unix, Adobe said in its security update released Dec. 13. The vulnerabilities could lead to a cross-site scripting attack in ColdFusion Remote Development Services and in custom tags used to develop dynamic forms, according to Adobe.
“Adobe categorizes this as an important update and recommends that users apply the latest update for their product installation,” the company said in the advisory.
The company issued a security advisory last week warning of a critical zero-day vulnerability in Reader and Acrobat that is actively being exploited in the wild. The flaw is due to a corruption in the U3D memory, a technology that Reader and Acrobat rely on to interact with 3D objects. An attacker could create a malicious PDF file containing a 3D object to crash computer systems or potentially take over a targeted system, according the Adobe’s security advisory.
Several security researchers found samples of an attack email and malicious PDF files and concluded the attackers were targeting defense contractors. The exploits were “prevalent enough” to have Adobe break its normal cycle and promise an out-of-band patch, Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of Qualys, told eWEEK. The patch was for Adobe Reader 9.x for Windows since Adobe Reader X is able to block the malicious code from executing because of its sandboxing technology.
It would be “better” if administrators could update users to Adobe Reader X, Kandek said, noting this is the third vulnerability disclosed this year that Reader X successfully blocked.
Adobe also updated AIR and Flash Player for Android on Dec. 12. Despite announcing on Nov. 9 that the company willcease Flash development for the Android mobile platform to focus on HTML5, Flash Player for Android 11.1.111.5 is available on the Android Market. The updates do not support the latest version of the operating system,Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, and it was not clear when that would be available.
“This release includes no major features but enhancements and bug fixes related to security, stability, performance, and device compatibility,” Adobe specified.
The update fixes issues related to video streaming on the Samsung Galaxy S II where audio plays without video, 1080p video for Nvidia Tegra 3-based devices and video playback for video decoding, according to the release notes. Known issues include Android failing to prioritize incoming calls so audio keeps playing even after a call and failing to prevent the Enter key from working inside a multiline text input field.
Only two weeks earlier, Adobe patched avulnerability in the Flex SDK on all operating systems that would have exposed applications to a cross-site scripting attack. The bug, if exploited, would have allowed attackers to take over applications built using a vulnerable version of the SDK. The Adobe Flex SDK is used to create Flash applets for Web applications.