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Adobe Warns of Flash, PDF Zero-Day Attacks
InfosecWarrior writes "Adobe issued an alert late Friday night to warn about zero-day attacks against an unpatched vulnerability in its Reader and Flash Player software products. The vulnerability, described as critical, affects Adobe Flash Player 10.0.45.2 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and Solaris operating systems. It also affects the authplay.dll component that ships with Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.x for Windows, Macintosh, and Unix operating systems."
... my iPad isn't affected !
Figure it out, Steve. Every other platform is getting Flash, I want the same opportunity for malware exploits that other mobile platforms will be getting.
Problems like this are common because reader and flash are ubiquitous, flash because it has no viable alternatives and reader because most users don't realise that there are far superior pdf viewers out there (i've even seen people install reader on macs where a far superior pdf viewer comes by default)...
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The closest platforms to getting it right are Apple and Linux distros. I say that because they provide a central software base and can push out updates all coming from one place. If you use something like Windows, you have to get updates from Microsoft, your hardware manufactures and then your 3rd party software. AFAIK, Windows still does not come with a PDF viewer, and I think its time for 3rd party plugins to completely disappear from web browsers. I've held the plugin belief for over 10 years.
Even if I say that Apple and Linux are better, they too are broken. And then there are 3rd party apps that continually want you to upgrade them before you run them. Its obnoxious. I can't think of any consumer or professional piece of equipment that needs such care and feeding. If my car has issues (yeah car analogy), then there is a recall. Its a big deal. I would never drive a car that says, "Before you start your car, there is an important safety update, do you want to install that update or blow it off?"
I guess I'm saying that now that internet access is available via cell technology and wifi and wired devices, and I don't know of anybody that uses a compuer not connected to one of these things, that bandwidth needs to increase and "cloud" or computing as a service needs to become a reality. Sure, nobody trusts these big bad internet companies with their data besides the exceptions like online tax services, online banking, facebook and their ilk, ISPs with their logs and their email, ecommerce, and other random services. But maybe, just maybe in the near future there can be a stable computing platform.
Deleting, renaming, or removing access to the authplay.dll file that ships with Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.x mitigates the threat for those products, but users will experience a non-exploitable crash or error message when opening a PDF file that contains SWF content.
A initially rather secure document format (PDF) has become insecure because Adobe has added a plethora of mostly useless functions like Flash, Javascript etc to it.
No, problems like this are common because companies keep cramming more and more unnecessary crap into their software. From the article:
Why do you need "SWF content" in a PDF file? And then there was the story from a couple months ago about the ability to embed executable commands in a PDF file, and it it isn't a flaw - it's a feature built into the PDF spec. Sloppy programming combined with more and more crap that doesn't belong, guarantees that these problems will keep showing up.
Buzzword or not, "zero day" means a vulnerability that is already being exploited by the time it's published. If vulnerability is published but no exploit exists -> no zero day.
Regardless of what you think of reasons for using that "zero day" label, this is very relevant to end-users: zero day -> you're at risk, NOW. No zero day -> you're probably safe (for the time being, that is).
Not entirely correct, historically it meant an exploit that was discovered by the vendor by the fact that it was being exploited. Meaning, they had zero days to develop a patch.
So if, for example, someone reported this to Adobe previously, and Adobe hadn't fixed it yet, then it isn't a zero day exploit. If Adobe only found out about the vulnerability because people were exploiting it, it was a zero day vulnerability.
Which might be what you were saying, but it didn't come out unambiguously that way. :)
If Adobe had the brains of a hamster, it would prohibit executable content in PDF files. Anything fancier than a fill-in-the-blank form has no place in a document format. Business needs some sort of standardized format in which to exchange written documents electronically, and PDF has fulfilled this role until now (barring the dimwits who still send Word files around). Allowing PDF to include executable content is not only dumb - it will eventually destroy PDF as a trusted format.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
I wonder about this. I'm sure it's a rather complex issue (that will be picked apart time again for years to come), but the one idea that leapt out at me was one you pointed out:
... HTML5 core part of browsers will likely be much better maintained & secured than [Flash], will help.
HTML5 may not be a silver bullet, but my intuition tells me we'll be much better off. But not having a clear idea of exactly why this is and spouting my intuition out, while perhaps a Slashdot tradition, is not very constructive, so I offer this intuition with this disclaimer.
I cannot imagine who on earth would want Flash content in PDFs. I imagine it is still some brainless marketing fuck at Adobe who thinks PDfs will trump Powerpoint for presentation and so they have to cram in just as much useless shit as can be crammed into a pptx/pps file.
What truly fucking bothers me is that the "fix" they offer is not a fix at all. Installing a release candidate Flash player across a company will not be easy in many cases and who the fuck is going to go searching for craptasticadobeshit.dll on all their machines. Sadly, this is such a problem that you have no choice, unless you want to block all Flash content and in many industries, such as media or design, that's simply impossible.
Adobe is so fucking lost it's not funny. Their Flash player is a buggy, unsecure piece of shit. Their Acrobat PDF Reader is even worse, slow to start up, full of utterly useless shit that easily 99% of people who need to view a pdf don't need, and regularly an opportunity for malware authors to get at your machine. On top of this, Adobe is so choking on their shit that they coded almost all the dialogs in the new CS5 suite in fucking Flash, leaving previously satisified customers seething with anger because dialogs that were already pretty unstandard in the last two version of the CS ballsup are now more often than not, simply not working anymore.
For the love of God, please someone, anyone, make a decent alternative to the CS suite so we don't have to put up with Adobe's increasingly bizarre attempt to remain relevant by shovelling ever more shit into what were previously perfectly good apps!