Adobe has released new versions of Flash Player to address a total of 77 vulnerabilities, most of which can be exploited for arbitrary code execution.
The flaws, rated critical, affect versions 19.0.0.245/18.0.0.261 and earlier of Flash Player. The security holes have been patched with the release of versions 20.0.0.228, 20.0.0.235 (Desktop Runtime with support for Firefox and Safari), and 18.0.0.268 (Extended Support).
The list of vulnerabilities includes buffer overflow, stack overflow, type confusion, integer overflow, use-after-free, and other memory corruption issues that can lead to code execution. Three security bypass flaws have also been fixed.
The following researchers and companies have been credited for reporting the Flash Player vulnerabilities: bee13oy, bilou, Furugawa Nagisa, Hui Gao of Palo Alto Networks, instruder of the Alibaba Security Threat Information Center, Jie Zeng and LMX of Qihoo 360, Natalie Silvanovich of Google Project Zero, Nicolas Joly of Microsoft Security, Yuki Chen of Qihoo 360’s Vulcan Team, willJ of Tencent PC Manager, and the French security firm VUPEN.
Adobe says there is no evidence that any of the patched vulnerabilities have been exploited for malicious purposes.
Updates released by Adobe in October addressed only 13 vulnerabilities in Flash Player, but as the latest round of updates demonstrates, the application is far from being secure. Adobe announced in late November that it has decided to rebrand Adobe Flash Professional CC to Adobe Animate CC, but Flash is here to stay.
Google has released a new version of Chrome to update Flash and roll out 7 security fixes. Three of these vulnerabilities were reported by external researchers who received a total of $7,500 for their work.
The flaws patched in Chrome are a high severity type confusion in extensions (CVE-2015-6788) reported by an anonymous researcher, a high severity use-after-free in Blink (CVE-2015-6789) reported by cloudfuzzer, and a medium impact escaping issue found by Inti De Ceukelaire.
Microsoft released a total of 12 security bulletins in the December 2015 Patch Tuesday cycle. The bulletins address roughly 60 vulnerabilities, including a couple of Windows and Office flaws that have been exploited in the wild.