Adobe Fixes Bugs in Shockwave Player

Adobe, through one new security bulletin it released recently, patched several critical vulnerabilities that affect its Shockwave Player. The vulnerabilities, most generally, let attackers to run malware, randomly, on the affected system.

Actually, users with Adobe Shockwave Player on their computers enjoy the facility to run Adobe Director Software that may be on a website. With an Internet service on, Shockwave Player continues to be a highly popular application across the world. 50% of all global PCs or over 450m computers have this application installed. Still it isn't as widely used as Adobe Flash Player that nearly every PC across the globe has.

Meanwhile, Adobe in a declaration said that researchers have detected critical security flaws within Adobe Shockwave Player 11.5.7.609 along with older versions on computers running Mac or Windows OS.

Upon effectively abusing these flaws, an attacker can execute malware on the vulnerable machine. Thus Adobe has suggested that people using Adobe Shockwave Player 11.5.7.609 as well as older versions should upgrade the application to version 11.5.8.612, immediately.

Adobe, through its Shockwave Player 11.5.8.612, fixes 18 critical bugs. The problems affect all of Shockwave's earlier editions too. Overall, the new update plugs 20 security holes.

And in nearly all these cases, the flaws occur due to problems of memory corruption. There are also a few denial-of-service problems in the flaws' collective. However, according to Adobe, there hasn't been any report so far of the flaws being exploited.

States the company, security firms, independent researchers along with groups are responsible for discovering the flaws. Check Point's researcher Rodrigo Rubira Branco has discovered 6 of the total flaws. A number of researchers, including those whose names are undisclosed uncovered the flaws through the utilization of the Zero Day Initiative of TippingPoint.

Notably, during August 2010, Adobe issued security patches for Adobe Flash Player, Flash Media Server and ColdFusion. Moreover, it produced an emergency update to fix one flaw in Adobe Reader that was disclosed at the July 2010 BlackHat conference.

Meanwhile, Adobe, which is trying to enhance its products' security, lately declared plans for incorporating sandboxing technology into Adobe Reader.

Related article: Adobe Rates Acrobat Vulnerabilities “Critical”

» SPAMfighter News - 9/1/2010