Confusion mounts over which Flash versions are under attack

Top Stories

Related

• Clues point to Jan. 13 release of Windows 7 beta
• Chinese city requires Net cafes to use legitimate software
• Microsoft releases Vista SP2 beta
• Obama's DHS pick may find support for raising H-1B cap at confirmation hearing
• IBM wants info from Apple execs in Papermaster case
• Report: Former AOL chief exec tries to raise funds to buy Yahoo

• Malware count blows past 1M mark
• Hackers launch massive IFRAME attack
• Mass host hack bigger than first thought, hits 10,000 sites
• Malware evolving too fast for antivirus apps
• Sophisticated Trojan loots business bank accounts

Zone

The Security Zone With the mobility of employees and the ease with which external devices can be brought in and out of a network, continuing to build your security plan for network servers and clients is a must. Fortunately, there is much that organizations can do to protect themselves from attacks - internal and external. Having the right policies, procedures and server configurations is critical... Learn more in The Security Zone See All Zones

May 28, 2008 (Computerworld) Contrary to initial reports, the Flash Player exploit being fed to users who visit legitimate Web sites is not a true zero-day exploit, a researcher said today.

But that's hardly the point, said Don Jackson, the director of threat intelligence at SecureWorks Inc. "I'd still call this catastrophic," said Jackson, "because when you look at the distribution of Flash versions, users hardly ever have the latest one."

In fact, Jackson was on target in more ways than he knew. Ben Greenbaum, a senior research manager at Symantec Corp., said later that although the vulnerability is not new -- and thus not really a "zero-day" bug -- some up-to-date versions of Flash Player are vulnerable to attack.

Greenbaum called it a "false-positive zero-day" and added that the exploit in circulation "does still work against some of the most current and patched versions of Flash Player, and so still has some characteristics of a zero-day."

For his part, Jackson said that the currently available version of Flash Player, dubbed 9.0.124.0, is immune, while computers running Flash Player 9.0.115.0 -- the edition superseded by an April update that Adobe Systems Inc. released to patch other vulnerabilities -- is susceptible to attack. "It looks like [9.0.124.0] has been patched," he said.

Greenbaum, however, went a step further. "The vulnerability is similar enough [to one already disclosed] that we're treating it as the same," he said. "But not all the versions are patched correctly."

The more widely-used browser plug-in of Flash Player 9.0.124.0 is not at risk, said Greenbaum, but the stand-alone Flash Player 9.0.124.0 is. Adobe offers both browser plug-in and stand-alone versions of its Flash Player.

Although it's not unheard of for patches to not properly protect all versions of a particular program, Greenbaum said, it is unusual, and even more so when comparing the stand-alone and plug-in editions of an application.

Adobe was not immediately available to confirm Greenbaum's claims, but the Symantec researcher said that his team had been working with the Flash developer since yesterday on the problem. "This is the latest and greatest news," Greenbaum said.

The Flash Player is-or-isn't-at-risk story began Tuesday, when researchers at the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center and Symantec raised an alarm about the exploit and said it was triggering an unknown, and unpatched, vulnerability in the popular plug-in and application.

Later yesterday, however, Symantec seemed to back off its initial analysis. "Originally, it was believed that this issue was unpatched and unknown, but further technical analysis has revealed that it is very similar to the previously reported Adobe Flash Player Multimedia File Remote Buffer Overflow Vulnerability (BID 28695), discovered by Mark Dowd of IBM," Symantec said in a explanation of why it had bumped its ThreatCon ranking to Level 2.