Adobe patches critical vulnerabilities in Photoshop and Illustrator CS5.x

Adobe released several security updates on Monday, addressing nine arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities that affect Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator CS5.x for Windows and Mac OS X.

Back in May, Adobe alerted users about the existence of eight security vulnerabilities in the CS5.x versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash Professional.

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At the time, the company advised customers to upgrade to the CS6 versions of those products, which aren’t affected by those vulnerabilities, or to exercise caution when opening files from unknown sources if upgrading is not possible.

Adobe’s suggestion that customers should pay a considerable amount of money — $199 per product upgrade — in order to protect their systems from vulnerabilities that affect products they already bought, was strongly criticized by some security experts.

However, a few days after the initial security advisories were published, the software company publicly committed to releasing security patches for the CS5.x versions of the affected products as well.

On Monday Adobe released security updates for Photoshop CS5 (12.0) and Photoshop CS5.1 (12.1) that address three arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities present in those products. If they were left unpatched, hackers could exploit them to take control of the operating system by tricking users into opening maliciously crafted files.

At the same time, the company released security patches for Adobe Illustrator CS5 (15.0) and Adobe Illustrator CS5.5 (15.1). These address six vulnerabilities that could be exploited in a similar manner and for the same goal as the Photoshop ones.

Adobe is not aware of any ongoing attacks that target the vulnerabilities patched by the newly released Photoshop and Illustrator security updates, the company said in the corresponding security bulletins.

Adobe Flash Professional CS5.5.1 remains vulnerable to a buffer overflow vulnerability that can lead to arbitrary code execution. The company is working on a patch and will release it at a later date.