Adobe Systems pushed out a security update for Flash Player today to further harden the product against attacks.
The update is for Windows, Mac and Linx users, and addresses a vulnerability that can be exploited by attackers to potentially execute code.
Adobe spokesperson Heather Edell said that last month, the company issued a “proactive mitigation” that was successful in blocking an attack against CVE-2014-8439, a vulnerability in the handling of a dereferenced memory pointer. Because there was a specific attack targeting the vulnerability however, the company added further mitigations in today’s release, she said.
“We discovered the vulnerability while analyzing a Flash exploit from an exploit kit called Angler,” blogged Timo Hirvonen, senior researcher at F-Secure. “We received the sample from Kafeine, a renowned exploit kit researcher. He asked us to identify the vulnerability which was successfully exploited with Flash Player 15.0.0.152 but not with 15.0.0.189. That would imply the vulnerability was something patched in APSB14-22. However, based on the information that we had received via Microsoft Active Protections Program the exploit didn’t match any of the vulnerabilities patched in APSB14-22 (CVE-2014-0558, CVE-2014-0564, or CVE-2014-0569).”
“We considered the possibility that maybe the latest patch prevented the exploit from working and the root cause of the vulnerability was still unfixed so we contacted the Adobe Product Security Incident Response Team,” he continued. “They confirmed our theory and released an out-of-band update to provide additional hardening against a vulnerability in the handling of a dereferenced memory pointer that could lead to code execution, CVE-2014-8439.”
In October, Kafeine reported the Angler exploit kit was targeting the vulnerability, and the Astrum and Nuclear exploit kits soon followed suit, Hirvonen noted. Kafeine also reported last week that another Flash Player vulnerability, CVE-2014-8440, was being targeted by Angler as well.
“Considering the exploit kit authors reverse engineered October’s Flash update in two days, installing the update immediately is paramount, whether you do it manually or automatically,” he blogged.