Adobe releases second critical Flash patch

Adobe has released its second critical patch for Flash this month, to cover six vulnerabilities that were not addressed on Patch Tuesday.

The company issued one Flash patch on Tuesday August 14, to address a vulnerability that had been actively exploited in "limited, targeted attacks" against users of Flash for Internet Explorer in Windows.

Last week, it issued new updates for Flash and Adobe Air on Windows, Mac, Linux and Android platforms.

Windows and Mac users were encouraged to update to Flash v11.4.402.265. Google Chrome users were urged to update to v11.3.31.230 on Windows and Linux, and Flash Player v11.4.402.265 for Mac.

Windows and Mac users were also encouraged to update to Adobe Air 3.4.0.2540.

Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of Qualys, said that five of the flaws were categorised as ‘critical' and could lead to remote code execution on the attacked machine.

“We recommend installing the update as quickly as possible, at least on the Windows platform where it carries the highest priority rating of ‘one', with an associated recommended patch turnaround time of 72 hours,” he said.

“Overall the release will be a bit of a surprise for IT administrators, as we had a Flash Player release last week during the normal Patch Tuesday, together with the new versions of Acrobat/Reader and Shockwave Player.

"We believe that last week's release was an out-of-band emergency fix to address a specific vulnerability under abuse in the wild and that could not be integrated with this bigger release.”

Last week, Google engineers noted that Adobe had also missed dozens of Adobe Reader vulnerabilities on Patch Tuesday.

The engineers reported that sixteen vulnerabilities still affected the Windows and Mac OS X versions, while 31 critical and “trivially exploitable” bugs were found in the Linux application.

This article originally appeared at scmagazineuk.com