Adobe informed users on Tuesday that it’s preparing a patch for a Flash Player zero-day vulnerability that has been actively exploited by malicious actors.
According to the company, the critical flaw, identified as CVE-2016-1019, exists in Flash Player 21.0.0.197 and earlier versions for Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS.
Fortunately, Flash Player 21.0.0.182, a version released in March, introduces a mitigation that prevents attackers from exploiting the vulnerability. Adobe says attacks involving CVE-2016-1019 have been launched against systems running Windows XP and Windows 7 with Flash 20.0.0.306 and earlier.
The vendor has promised to release a patch for this zero-day as early as Thursday, April 7. In the meantime, users are advised to ensure that their Flash installation is updated to version 21.0.0.182 or later.
Adobe has credited Kafeine of Proofpoint, Genwei Jiang of FireEye, and Clement Lecigne of Google for reporting the issue.
This will be the third Flash Player update issued by Adobe this year. The first, released in February, fixed 22 memory corruption flaws that could have been exploited for arbitrary code execution. The second update was released in March, when the company resolved a total of 23 vulnerabilities, including CVE-2016-1010, which had been exploited in targeted attacks.
Adobe also released this year updates for Acrobat, Reader, Digital Editions, Photoshop, Connect and Experience Manager.
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