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.

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Microsoft has released Vista & Windows Server Service Pack 2.

Download: Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 SP2 x86 (5 Language Standalone)
Download: Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 SP2 x64 (5 Language Standalone)

Eventually this update will be available through Automatic Windows Update.

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Many agree Adobe has never responded to security vulnerabilities in their popular products quickly. Known vulnerabilities would take weeks and in some cases months before being addressed. Most recently in February Adobe confirmed a known vulnerability in their Acrobat PDF software and admitted the vulnerability is actively being used by hackers. Brad Arkin, Adobe’s director for product security and privacy mentions this event is what prompted a new security practice.

Adobe has started reviewing the code in Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat products and is identifying “at-risk areas” that will be addressed and ultimately re-written. “We’re going to broadly look at the whole application, but focus on at-risk areas, where we’ll do threat modeling, static code analysis and look for potential vulnerabilities,” said Arkin. “We’re going to do a lot more pro-active work,” he promised. “We want to shake loose vulnerabilities.”

Arkin promises a regular patching cycle and in fact will deliver patches the same day as Microsoft. Although their patch cycle is quarterly, not monthly, the patches will be delivered the second Tuesday of the month. This schedule has not officially started.  Arkin also mentioned JavaScript will not be disabled by default in future builds of Adobe Acrobat products.

More information on Adobe Acrobat’s new security initiative can be found on Adobe’s Asset blog.

Author: Christopher

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If you heard of maliciously rigged PDF files, then you probably have been waiting for Microsoft to patch this vulnerability that they originally blamed FireFox for back in July. Known attack vectors exist in these applications while used with Internet Explorer 7:

• Mozilla Firefox (2.0.0.5 and lower)
• Skype (3.5.0.238 and lower)
• Adobe Acrobat 8.1
• Miranda 0.7
• Netscape 7.1
• MIRC chat for windows

Back early in October, Microsoft released Security Advisory 943521 about the vulnerability and reports of remote code execution with the promise of a new patch. As of today, the patch is released as security bulletin MS07-061.

Windows XP & Windows 2003 Servers using Internet Explorer 7 should update as soon as possible to this patch.

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