Vulnerability Management

Adobe reveals new flaw affecting Flash and Reader

A "critical" zero-day vulnerability affecting Adobe Flash Player, Reader and Acrobat is being exploited in the wild, Adobe warned on Thursday.

The flaw, which could cause a crash or allow an attacker to take control of an affected system, is actively being exploited against Adobe Reader and Acrobat, Adobe said in its advisory. The company said it is not aware of any attacks targeting Flash.

The bug affects the current version of the software, Flash Player version 10.1.85.3, and earlier versions for Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris. It also affects the latest version of Flash Player for Android (10.1.95.2) and earlier versions.

In addition, the flaw affects the authplay.dll component that ships with Reader version 9 for Windows, Mac and UNIX and Acrobat 9 for Windows and Mac.

Reader and Acrobat version 8 and Reader for Android are not vulnerable.

Adobe is developing a fix for the flaw and expects to provide an update for Flash by Nov. 9 and for Reader and Acrobat during the week of Nov. 15.

In the meantime, to mitigate the threat, Adobe recommended deleting, renaming or removing access to the authplay.dll file that ships with Reader and Acrobat 9.

Users are warned, however, that doing so will result in a non-exploitable crash or error message when opening a PDF file that contains Flash content.

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