Last Thursday Adobe patched 12 bugs in their Flash application, three of these were caused by Microsoft.  For at least a week hackers have been exploiting at least one of these vulnerabilities.  You can find the full details of the security bulletin on Adobe’s website under Security Advisories.

The report refers to ten vulnerabilities that can potentially lead to compromised systems by allowing hackers to execute their own code.  Windows, Mac, and Linux machines were address in this patch, although Solaris is still set for a future update.

July 10th Microsoft notified Adobe about vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s ATL (Active Template Library), two weeks prior to public announcement.  Microsoft security team has been investigating these ATL for flaws since early 2008.  “[Microsoft] was moving very fast to pull resources together to help us do triage on our products,” said Brad Arkin, Adobe’s director for product security and privacy.

“The hard part was determining what was vulnerable,” said Brad. “It’s easy to rebuild a test version, but then we had to make sure [that] works and make sure we didn’t break it.”

Patched versions of the Flash Player  for Windows, Mac and Linux can be downloaded from Adobe’s Web site.   Users can use Flash’s built-in automatic update mechanism to grab the new versions.

It is a step in the right direction to see Adobe take vulnerabilities in their products more seriously and address these issues in a timely fashion.

Tags: , , , ,

Author: Christopher