Adobe’s Patch Tuesday updates for January 2018 resolve only an information disclosure vulnerability affecting Flash Player.
The flaw is tracked as CVE-2018-4871, it has been classified as “important,” and it has been assigned a priority rating of 2, which means it’s unlikely to be exploited in malicious attacks any time soon.
The security hole has been described as an out-of-bounds read issue that can lead to information exposure. It affects Flash Player 28.0.0.126 and earlier on Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS, and it has been patched with the release of version 28.0.0.137. The patch will also be included in the next Chrome release and Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday updates.
Adobe says it has learned about the vulnerability from an anonymous researcher via Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI).
The number of vulnerabilities discovered by researchers in Flash Player has dropped significantly in the past months after Adobe announced its intention to kill the application by 2020.
However, malicious actors are still finding and exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in Flash. In October, shortly after Adobe announced that it had no Patch Tuesday updates, the company was forced to quickly release a fix for Flash Player after learning that a cyber espionage group from the Middle East had been leveraging a zero-day to deliver spyware.
The same vulnerability was later exploited by the Russia-linked group APT28 (also known as Fancy Bear, Pawn Storm, Strontium, Sofacy, Sednit and Tsar Team) in attacks aimed at government organizations and aerospace companies. Fortunately, this was apparently the only Flash Player zero-day exploited in 2017.
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