Adobe on Tuesday warned that a gaping security hole in one of the most widely deployed software products has been exploited in the wild in “limited attacks targeting Adobe Reader users on Windows.”
Adobe’s confirmation of the zero-day attack was buried in a security bulletin that documents at least 11 security vulnerabilities affected Adobe Acrobat and Reader on both Windows and MacOS platforms.
“These updates address multiple critical and important vulnerabilities. Successful exploitation could lead to arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user,” according to the bulletin.
Adobe’s Acrobat Reader is widely used freeware to view, create, fill, print and format files in the Portable Document Format (PDF). The software has long been a rich target for advanced threat actors conducting targeted attacks.
[READ: Hackers Target Windows Adobe Type Manager Library ]
The under-attack flaw — CVE-2021-28550 — is described as a use-after-free memory corruption issue that was discovered and reported anonymously to Adobe. The company did not provide any additional details on the active exploitation.
The mega-patch release from Adobe documents at least 23 flaws in a range of products, including a pair of security holes in the Adobe Experience Manager, a trio of security flaws in Adobe InDesign and five serious bugs in Adobe Illustrator.
The company also patched security vulnerabilities in Adobe InCopy and Adobe Genuine Service.