Adobe has updated its Adobe Flash Player for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux to address a total of six vulnerabilities that could be exploited to take control of impacted systems.
Adobe Flash Player for Windows and Adobe Flash Player for Mac OS X have been updated to version 14.0.0.125, and Adobe is advising users of 13.0.0.214 and earlier releases to update their installations. Linux users are recommended to update to version 11.2.202.378.
Adobe Flash Player installed with Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 10 and Internet Explorer 11 is updated automatically, the company said in an advisory published Tuesday.
Additionally, Adobe AIR, Adobe AIR SDK and Compiler, and Adobe AIR SDK have been updated to version 14.0.0.110. The security updates for these applications have been assigned a priority rating of 3, just like the update for the Linux version of Adobe Flash Player.
The Adobe Flash Player updates for the Windows and Mac OS X versions have been assigned a “priority 1” rating, which according to Adobe, indicates that they resolve “vulnerabilities being targeted, or which have a higher risk of being targeted, by exploit(s) in the wild for a given product version and platform.”
According to Qualys CTO Wolfgang Kandek, the updates from Adobe are of the second-most importance after the MS14-035 bulletin, which was addressed in June’s Patch Tuesday update from Microsoft.
“Adobe’s Flash player has a critical update and since attacker’s frequently use Adobe Flash as their tool of choice we recommend installing APSB14-16 next,” Kandek blogged. “It is rated critical by Adobe for Windows and Mac. Windows XP users will remain exposed as Adobe is not testing and distributing this update for XP anymore. Google Chrome and IE10/11 users get their updates automatically through the browser that includes Flash, which is a good security enhancing feature.”
The vulnerabilities fixed in the latest versions of Adobe Flash Player are:
CVE-2014-0531, CVE-2014-0532, CVE-2014-0533: cross-site-scripting vulnerabilities reported to Adobe by Erling Ellingsen of Facebook;
CVE-2014-0534: security bypass vulnerability reported by Masato Kinugawa;
CVE-2014-0535: security bypass issue reported to Adobe by Bas Venis;
CVE-2014-0536: memory corruption vulnerability that could result in arbitrary code execution, reported by Leong Wai-Meng of Trend Micro.
Users can follow the online instructions to verify the version of Adobe AIR installed on a system.
In addition to Adobe, Microsoft patched several dozen vulnerabilities as part June’s Patch Tuesday, including several critical security issues affecting Internet Explorer.
