Adobe Releases Patches for Dozens of Critical Flaws in 5 Software

Adobe today released the latest security updates for five of its
widely used software that patch a total of 42 newly discovered
vulnerabilities, 35 of which are critical in severity.

The first four of the total five affected software, all listed
below, are vulnerable to at least one critical arbitrary code
execution vulnerability that could allow attackers to take full
control of vulnerable systems.

• Adobe Framemaker
• Adobe Acrobat and Reader
• Adobe Flash Player
• Adobe Digital Edition
• Adobe Experience Manager

In brief, Adobe
Framemaker^[1] for Windows, an advanced
document processing software, contains 21 flaws, and all of them
are critical buffer error, heap overflow, memory corruption, and
out-of-bounds write issues, leading to code execution attacks.

Adobe Acrobat and
Reader for Windows and macOS also contain 12 similar critical
code execution vulnerabilities, along with 3 other important
information disclosure and a moderate memory leak issue.
^[2]

Whereas, the latest update for Adobe Flash
Player^[3], one of the most
infamous software in terms of having the worst security record of
all time, has patched yet another critical arbitrary code execution
flaw. If exploited, this flaw could allow hackers to compromise
targeted Windows, macOS, Linux, and Chrome OS-based computers.

Adobe has also patched a new critical arbitrary code execution
flaw and an important information disclosure issue in Digital
Edition^[4], another popular e-book
reader software program developed by Adobe.

At last, Adobe Experience
Manager^[5]—a comprehensive content
management solution for building websites, mobile apps, and
forms—doesn’t contain any critical flaw this time but has patched
an important denial-of-service (DoS) issue that affects only
versions 6.5 and 6.4 of the software.

Though none of the software vulnerabilities fixed this month
were publicly disclosed or found being exploited in the wild, The
Hacker News still highly recommend readers to download and install
the latest versions of the affected software.

If your system has not yet detected the availability of the new
update automatically, you should manually install the update by
choosing “Help → Check for Updates” in your Adobe software for
Windows, macOS, Linux, and Chrome OS.

Besides this, you are also advised to follow some basic system
security practices, such as:

• Run all software with the least required privileges,
• Avoid downloading or handling files from untrusted or unknown
  sources,
• Never visit sites of untrusted or suspicious integrity,
• Block external access at the network level to all critical
  systems unless specific access is required.