Adobe Patches Critical Vulnerability in Shockwave Player

Adobe updated Shockwave Player on Tuesday to address a critical vulnerability that can be exploited for arbitrary code execution.

The vulnerability, a memory corruption issue (CVE-2015-7649), affects Shockwave Player 12.2.0.162 and earlier for Windows and Mac. The flaw has been addressed with the release of version 12.2.1.171.

The security hole has been assigned a priority rating of 1, which indicates a high risk of being targeted by exploits in the wild, and a severity rating of "critical," which shows that the flaw can be exploited to execute malicious code without the victim being aware.

Adobe says it hasn't found any evidence to suggest that the weakness has been exploited in the wild. The company has credited Fortinet's Fortiguard Labs for reporting the vulnerability.

This is the third security update released by Adobe for Shockwave Player this year. An update rolled out in July addressed two critical memory corruption flaws reported by Fortinet, while an update released last month patched two similar issues discovered by Palo Alto Networks researchers.

While vulnerabilities in Shockwave Player are not very common, we can't say the same thing about Flash Player. Adobe has already released nearly 20 updates for Flash Player this year, some of which patched zero-day flaws that had been exploited in the wild before the fix was made available.

The latest example is a security hole (CVE-2015-7645) exploited by the Russia-linked threat group known as "Pawn Storm" in targeted attacks aimed at Foreign Affairs Ministries.