Adobe releases six critical patches for Flash, AIR

Adobe Systems released fixes on Tuesday for six critical vulnerabilities affecting its Flash multimedia application and AIR runtime, five of which could allow for remote code execution on a system.

The updates affect Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Google Chrome and users of Android 2.x, 3.x and 4.x devices, Adobe said in its advisory.

The patches address four memory corruption vulnerabilities — CVE-2012-4163, CVE-2012-4164, CVE-2012-4165 and CVE-2012-4166 — and an integer overflow vulnerability, CVE-2012-4167. Also fixed is a cross-domain information leak vulnerability, CVE-2012-4168.

“These updates address vulnerabilities that could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system,” Adobe said.

Windows and Apple users should use Flash version 11.4.402.265, and the up-to-date Linux version is 11.2.202.238. For Adobe’s AIR runtime, which allows Web applications to perform functions outside of a Web browser, Windows and Apple users should move to version 3.4.0.2540.

Last week, Adobe pushed out a fix for Flash for CVE-2012-1535, which the company said had been used in limited attacks. The problem can cause Flash to crash, or, at worst, allow an attacker to take over control of the computer.

The attack is initiated by sending targets a malicious Word document, which contains an exploit targeting the ActiveX version of Flash for the Internet Explorer browser, Adobe said. Security vendor Symantec wrote on Tuesday that it had detected and blocked more than 1,300 attacks since Aug. 10 using the vulnerability.

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