A critical vulnerability patched on Tuesday by Adobe in its Creative Cloud desktop application can be exploited by hackers to delete arbitrary files.
Adobe Creative Cloud is a set of applications and services used for video editing, graphic design, photography and web development. The Creative Cloud desktop application allows users to easily manage their apps and services.
According to Adobe, Jiadong Lu of the South China University of Technology and Zhiniang Peng of Qihoo 360 Core Security discovered that the Windows version of the Creative Cloud desktop application is affected by a time-of-check time-of-use (TOCTOU) race condition that can be exploited to delete arbitrary files in the context of the targeted user.
No other information has been made available about the vulnerability, but Adobe says it has found no evidence that it has been exploited for malicious purposes.
While the flaw has been assigned a critical severity rating, its priority score is 2, which indicates that Adobe does not expect to see any attacks exploiting the vulnerability too soon. Nevertheless, Adobe has advised customers to update the app “soon.” The flaw has been patched with the release of version 5.1.
Earlier this month, Adobe fixed tens of critical and important vulnerabilities in its Genuine Integrity Service, Acrobat and Reader, Photoshop, Experience Manager, ColdFusion, and Bridge products.
Lu and Peng were also both credited last year by Lenovo for finding a vulnerability in the company’s System Interface Foundation. The flaw allowed an authenticated attacker to execute code as another user.
Related: Hackers Target Two Unpatched Flaws in Windows Adobe Type Manager Library
Related: Adobe Patches Vulnerabilities in Illustrator, Experience Manager
Related: Adobe Patches 42 Vulnerabilities Across Five Products
Related: Adobe Patches ColdFusion Vulnerability Exploited in the Wild

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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