Lucian Constantin
CSO Senior Writer

Adobe patches two critical vulnerabilities in Shockwave Player

news
Feb 12, 20142 mins

The flaws could allow attackers to execute malicious code on computers remotely

Adobe Systems released a security update for Shockwave Player in order to address two vulnerabilities that could allow attackers to remotely take control of affected systems.

The new Shockwave Player version released Tuesday is 12.0.9.149 and is available for Windows and Mac.

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The update fixes two memory corruption vulnerabilities identified as CVE-2014-0500 and CVE-2014-0501 that could lead to code execution, Adobe said in a security advisory. The vulnerabilities were reported to the company by researcher Liangliang Song of Fortinet’s FortiGuard Labs.

The Shockwave Player update comes one week after Adobe broke out of its regular patching cycle to release an emergency update for Flash Player that addressed an actively exploited vulnerability. Unlike the Flash Player flaw, there are no reports that the Shockwave Player vulnerabilities are being exploited in attacks.

Shockwave Player is needed to display online content like games, product demonstrations, e-learning courses and simulations created with Adobe’s Director software. It’s not as widespread as Flash Player, but it is deployed on over 450 million desktop computers according to Adobe, which makes it a potential target for hackers.

Shockwave Player installs a plug-in in Web browsers which means it can be attacked with drive-by download exploits loaded from maliciously crafted or infected websites.

Lucian Constantin

Lucian Constantin writes about information security, privacy, and data protection for CSO. Before joining CSO in 2019, Lucian was a freelance writer for VICE Motherboard, Security Boulevard, Forbes, and The New Stack. Earlier in his career, he was an information security correspondent for the IDG News Service and Information security news editor for Softpedia.

Before he became a journalist, Lucian worked as a system and network administrator. He enjoys attending security conferences and delving into interesting research papers. He lives and works in Romania.

You can reach him at lucian_constantin@foundryco.com or @lconstantin on X. For encrypted email, his PGP key's fingerprint is: 7A66 4901 5CDA 844E 8C6D 04D5 2BB4 6332 FC52 6D42

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