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Ryan Naraine, Emil Protalinski and Dancho Danchev

Exploit published for unpatched Adobe Shockwave vulnerability

By | October 21, 2010, 2:09pm PDT

Summary: Adobe has issued a security advisory to confirm the vulnerability and warn that the public attack code could provide a roadmap for malicious hackers to take complete control of a vulnerable computer.

A security researcher has released an exploit for an unpatched security vulnerability in Adobe’s Shockwave Player, warning that the flaw could be targeted to launch drive-by malware download attacks.

Adobe has issued a security advisory to confirm the vulnerability and warn that the public attack code could provide a roadmap for malicious hackers to take complete control of a vulnerable computer.

Adobe rates the issue as “critical” and says the vulnerability affects Shockwave Player 11.5.8.612 and earlier versions for Windows and Mac OS X. follow Ryan Naraine on twitter

A critical vulnerability exists in Adobe Shockwave Player 11.5.8.612 and earlier versions on the Windows and Macintosh operating systems. This vulnerability (CVE-2010-3653) could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.

While details about the vulnerability have been disclosed publicly, Adobe is not aware of any attacks exploiting this vulnerability at this time.

Adobe did not say when a patch would be made available.

The company did not offer any pre-patch mitigations but said it was actively sharing information about this vulnerability (and vulnerabilities in general) with partners in the security community to enable them to quickly develop detection and quarantine methods to protect users until a patch is available.

Technical details on the vulnerability can be found here.

The vulnerability appears eerily similar to this issue that was patched in August but Adobe security chief Brad Arkin says they appear unrelated.  Adobe is still conducting triage on the bug.

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Topics

Ryan Naraine is a journalist and social media enthusiast specializing in Internet and computer security issues.

Disclosure

Ryan Naraine

The most important disclosure is of my employment with Kaspersky Lab as a member of the global research and analysis team. Kaspersky Lab is a global company specializing in anti-malware and secure content management technologies. I do not own stocks or other investments in any technology company.

Biography

Ryan Naraine

Ryan Naraine is a journalist and social media enthusiast specializing in Internet and computer security issues. He is currently security evangelist at Kaspersky Lab, an anti-malware company with operations around the globe. He is taking a leadership role in developing the company's online community initiative around secure content management technologies.

Prior to joining Kaspersky Lab, Ryan was Editor-at-Large/Security at eWEEK, leading the magazine's and Web site's coverage of Internet and computer security issues and managing the popular SecurityWatch blog, covering the daily threats, vulnerabilities and IT security technologies. He also covered IT security, hacker attacks and secure content management topics for Jupiter Media's internetnetnews.com.

Ryan can be reached at naraine SHIFT 2 gmail.com. For daily updates on Ryan's activities, follow him on Twitter.

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RE: Exploit published for unpatched Adobe Shockwave vulnerability
LegendsOfBatman 23rd Oct 2010
This is about as newsworthy as Lindsey Lohan's under the influence problems, with Adobe's inability to patch their product in a timely manner.
Did the sun rise? Then, adobe has a security hole.
A more intriguing story would be Adobe hasn't NEEDED to patch their product for 3 hours in a row.
0 Votes
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Wow!! It must be Thursday ....
wackoae 21st Oct 2010
For pretty much the entire year, a vulnerability on an Adobe product is found (or notified) every Thursday.

I think the Adobe is becoming like "old faithful" ... you can set your calendar by the release date of vulnerabilities.
@wackoae

Then you could also say that about ANY application, seeing as how most have reports of vulnerabilities that often.
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No problem
hhhobbit 22nd Oct 2010
Uninstall Shockwave and then you will have no problem, at least with it. Seriously, as wackoae said, the fewer things you have that can go wrong make you that much more secure. Of course, if you were running Linux there would be no problem anyway since Shockwave is not available for Linux. You also don't need Adobe Reader except for filling in forms because evince (also available on Windows) is what you use instead. You could substitute gnash / swfdec for flash but I would advise dumping the flash to get rid of the dog and pony show which everybody puts on their home page. Actually the biggest threat from flash are those super cookies that three businesses are getting sued over, one of which is used by none other than Disney.
This is about as newsworthy as Lindsey Lohan's under the influence problems, with Adobe's inability to patch their product in a timely manner.
Did the sun rise? Then, adobe has a security hole.
A more intriguing story would be Adobe hasn't NEEDED to patch their product for 3 hours in a row.

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