Adobe Issues Emergency Patches for Two Critical Flaws in Acrobat and Reader

Adobe has issued^[1] an out-of-band security
update to patch two critical vulnerabilities in the company’s
Acrobat and Reader for both the Windows and macOS operating
systems.

Though the San Jose, California-based software company did not
give details about the vulnerabilities, it did classify the
security flaws as critical since they allow privilege escalation
and arbitrary code execution in the context of the current
user.

Both the vulnerabilities were reported to Adobe by security
researchers–Abdul-Aziz Hariri and Sebastian Apelt—from Trend
Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI).

Critical Adobe Acrobat and Reader Vulnerabilities

The first vulnerability, reported by Apelt and identified as
CVE-2018-16011, is a use-after-free bug that can lead to arbitrary
code execution.

Attackers can exploit the flaw by tricking a user into clicking
a specially crafted PDF file, which will eventually execute code of
their choice with the privileges of the currently logged-in user,
allowing attackers to run any malicious software on the victims’
computers without their knowledge.

The second vulnerability, discovered by Hariri and identified as
CVE-2018-19725, is a security bypass flaw that could result in
privilege escalation.

Both security vulnerabilities are rated as critical but has been
assigned a priority rating of 2, which means that the company found
no evidence of any exploitation of these vulnerabilities in the
wild.

Affected Software Versions and Security Patches

Acrobat and Reader DC 2015 version 2015.006.30461 and earlier, 2017
version 2017.011.30110 and earlier, and Continuous version
2019.010.20064 and earlier for the Windows and macOS operating
systems are affected by the vulnerabilities.
Adobe has addressed the flaws with the release of the latest
versions of Acrobat DC 2015 and Acrobat Reader DC 2015 (version
2015.006.30464), Acrobat 2017 and Acrobat Reader DC 2017 (version
2017.011.30113), and Acrobat DC Continuous and Acrobat Reader DC
Continuous (version 2019.010.20069) for Windows and macOS.

Since the vulnerabilities are now public, threat actors would
not leave any opportunity to exploit the issues to target user
computers, Mac and Windows computer owners are highly recommended
to install patches for the two vulnerabilities as soon as
possible.

Adobe typically releases security updates for its software on
the second Tuesday of the month, just like Microsoft, so you can
expect the company to release regular patch updates for the rest of
its software in this month’s release.