Lucian Constantin
CSO Senior Writer

Adobe patches a critical vulnerability in Shockwave Player

news
Mar 13, 20142 mins

The flaw could enable remote code execution attacks

Adobe Systems released a new security update for Shockwave Player in order to fix a critical vulnerability that could allow attackers to remotely take control of affected systems.

The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2014-0505, is the result of a memory corruption issue and can lead to arbitrary code execution. According to Adobe, the flaw was privately reported to the company and there are no reports of active exploits targeting it in the wild.

[ InfoWorld’s expert contributors show you how to secure your Web browsers in a free PDF guide. Download it today! | Learn how to protect your systems with Roger Grimes’ Security Adviser blog and Security Central newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]

Adobe recommends users of Adobe Shockwave Player 12.0.9.149 and earlier versions to update to the newly released version 12.1.0.150, which is available for Windows and Mac, the company said Thursday in a security advisory.

The Shockwave Player update comes two days after Adobe released security patches for vulnerabilities in its more popular Flash Player product.

Shockwave Player installs a browser plug-in that’s needed to display interactive online content created with Adobe’s Director software. While it’s not as widespread as Flash Player, Shockwave Player is deployed on over 450 million desktop computers according to Adobe, which makes it a potential target for hackers.

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

More from this author