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Adobe Patch Day: Patches for Flash, Shockwave, and ColdFusion

Corey Nachreiner

Severity: High

Summary:

Exposure:

Today, Adobe released three security bulletins describing vulnerabilities in Flash Player, Shockwave Player, and ColdFusion. A remote attacker could exploit the worst of these flaws to gain complete control of your computer. The summary below details some of the vulnerabilities in these popular software packages.

Adobe’s bulletin describes four vulnerabilities in Flash Player running on all platforms. More specifically, the flaws consist of various memory corruption and integer overflow flaws. If an attacker can lure you to a web site, or get you to open a document containing specially crafted Flash content, he could exploit these flaws to execute code on your computer, with your privileges. If you have administrative or root privileges, the attacker could gain full control of your computer.

They assign these flaws their highest severity rating for Windows computers, but a lesser severity for Mac and Linux machines.

Adobe Priority Rating: 1 for Windows (Patch within 72 hours)

Adobe Shockwave Player displays interactive, animated web content and movies called Shockwave. According to Adobe, the Shockwave Player is installed on some 450 million PCs.

Adobe’s bulletin describes four security vulnerabilities that affect Shockwave Player running on Windows and Macintosh computers. All of the flaws consist of memory corruption issues (one being a buffer overflow) that share the same general scope and impact. If an attacker can entice one of your users into visiting a website containing some sort of malicious Shockwave content, he could exploit many of these vulnerabilities to execute code on that user’s computer, with that user’s privileges. If your Windows users have local administrator privileges, an attacker could exploit this flaw to gain full control of their PC.

Adobe Priority Rating: 1 (Patch within 72 hours)

Adobe ColdFusion is an application server that allows you to develop and deploy web applications. It suffers from two security vulnerabilities that Adobe does not describe in much technical detail. They describe one flaw as a vulnerability that allows an attacker to impersonate an authenticated user (CVE-2013-1387), and the other as a flaw that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to gain access to the administrative console. Other than that, the bulletin shares very little about the scope or impact of these flaws, so we’re unsure how easy or hard it is for attackers to leverage them. They rate both vulnerabilities as Priority 2 issues, which is essentially their medium severity rating.

Adobe Priority Rating: 2 (Patch within 30 days)

Solution Path:

Adobe has released updates for all their affected software. If you use any of the software below, we recommend you download and deploy the corresponding updates as soon as possible, or let Adobe’s automatic updater do it for you:

Keep in mind, if you use Google Chrome you’ll have to update it separately.

For All WatchGuard Users:

Attackers can exploit these flaws using diverse exploitation methods. However, WatchGuard’s XTM appliances can help in many ways. First, our IPS and AV services are often capable of detecting the malicious Flash or Shockwave files attackers are actually using in the wild. If you’d like, you can also configure our proxies to block Shockwave or Flash content. This, however, blocks both legitimate and malicious content. If you do want to block this Flash or Shockwave via the Web or email, see our manual for more details on how to configure our proxy policies’ content-filtering.

Status:

Adobe  has released patches correcting these issues.

References:

This alert was researched and written by Corey Nachreiner, CISSP (@SecAdept)

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