Commentary

George Hulme
 

Adobe, Mozilla Users At Risk To Remote Code Execution Flaws

Software maker Adobe Systems has certainly had its share of vulnerabilities recently. This week a security researcher added to the company's pain when he announced a vulnerability in Adobe Download Manager that allows remote attacks. Mozilla Firefox users are also at-risk to attacks against an unpatched flaw in that browser.

Software maker Adobe Systems has certainly had its share of vulnerabilities recently. This week a security researcher added to the company's pain when he announced a vulnerability in Adobe Download Manager that allows remote attacks. Mozilla Firefox users are also at-risk to attacks against an unpatched flaw in that browser.Israeli security researcher Aviv Raff says he discovered a flaw in Adobe's web site that enables malicious attackers to abuse Adobe Download Manager to force the automatic download of Adobe applications. Theoretically, the attackers could force the installation of a vulnerable Adobe product on a target's system, and then use that application to exploit the end user. Considering the wave of Adobe software vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash recently, such a scenario is well within reason.

As Raff explains it on his blog, an attacker merely needs to entice a user to click on a link to initiatate the download, or embed the link within an iFrame on a website.


More Security Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>

David Lenoe of the Adobe Product Security Incident Response Team says the company is working with Raff and the vendor Adobe's third part vendor for the component of their software to resolve the issue.

Meanwhile, users of Mozilla Firefox are vulnerable to remote code exploitation, where an attacker can inject code of their choice onto a victim's system.

No other details have been released on this particular flaw, but security firm Secunia has ranked the vulnerability as "highly critical."

No fix or workaround information is currently available, other than the advice to avoid untrusted links and web sites.


Related Reading




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links