11/05/2009

Critical Security Vulnerabilities in Adobe Shockwave Player

Kevin R. Smith
Co-Editor

Let's cut to the chase: patch your Adobe Shockwave. There are four different critical vulnerabilities in the Adobe Shockwave Player that lets an attacker remotely execute the code of their choosing on your PC.

Download Adobe Shockwave

	Vulnerability Cause	Why It Matters
	an invalid index when handling certain Shockwave content	could be exploited to execute arbitrary code by tricking a user into visiting a specially crafted web page
	an invalid pointer when processing certain Shockwave content, which could be exploited to execute arbitrary code by tricking a user into visiting a specially crafted web page.	same
	an invalid pointer when handling certain Shockwave content, which could be exploited to execute arbitrary code by tricking a user into visiting a specially crafted web page.	same
	a memory corruption related to string processing, which could be exploited to execute arbitrary code by tricking a user into visiting a specially crafted web page.	same

It isn't clear how much these threats can be mitigated by Internet security software, but typically the best antivirus firewalls do help mitigate these types of attacks.

Whatever the case though please take a minute now and update your Shockwave player. It's worth the time to eliminate this simple to exploit attack vector.

Posted by Kevin R. Smith at 12:00:00 AM in Adobe , Web/Tech