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Adobe Patch Day: Flash, Shockwave, and Reader; Oh My!

Corey Nachreiner

Severity: High

Summary:

Exposure:

Today, Adobe released three security bulletins describing vulnerabilities in Flash Player, Shockwave Player, and Reader (and the related Acrobat). 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 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 two unspecified memory corruption vulnerabilities that affects Shockwave Player running on Windows and Macintosh computers.They don’t share any technical details about the flaw, but do share its 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 the flaw 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 vulnerability to gain full control of their computer.

Adobe Priority Rating: 1 (Patch within 72 hours)

Adobe Reader helps you view PDF documents, while Acrobat helps you create them. Since PDF documents are very popular, most users install Reader to handle them.

Adobe’s bulletin describes eight vulnerabilities that affect Adobe Reader and Acrobat X 11.0.03 and earlier, running on Windows or Mac.  Adobe’s alert only describes the flaws in minimal detail, but most of them involve memory corruption-related vulnerabilities, such as buffer overflow and  integer overflow issues, and so on. For the most part, they share the same scope and impact. If an attacker can entice you into opening a specially crafted PDF file, he can exploit many of these issues to execute code on your computer, with your privileges. If you have root or system administrator privileges, the attacker gains complete control of your machine.

Adobe Priority Rating: 2 for version 10 (Patch within 30 days)

Adobe’s bulletin describes four vulnerabilities in Flash Player running on all platforms. More specifically, the flaws consist of various unspecified memory corruption 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.

Adobe assigns these flaws their highest severity rating for Windows and Mac computers, but a lesser severity for Linux and Android devices.

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

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, Shockwave, or Reader files attackers are actually using in the wild. If you’d like, you can also configure our proxies to block Shockwave, Flash, or Reader content. This, however, blocks both legitimate and malicious content. If you do want to block this content 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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