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Adobe squashes TWO critical Flash vulnerabilities with emergency patches

Two out of three threats are dangerous, being used in wild

Adobe published a critical Flash Player update on Tuesday to fix three exploits, two of which are under active attack by hackers.

Two of the three vulnerabilities are being used by nefarious folk, Adobe said, and one of these two explicitly targets the Firefox browser.

Adobe introduced the Flash Player sandbox a year ago to protect Firefox users from vulnerabilities in Flash. It appears this is now being targeted for permission escalation attacks.

"Adobe is aware of reports that CVE-2013-0643 and CVE 2013-0648 are being exploited in the wild in targeted attacks designed to trick the user into clicking a link which directs to a website serving malicious Flash (SWF) content," the company wrote in a security bulletin.

Adobe classified the update with a priority rating of 1 (do it now if you value your computer) for Windows and Macintosh systems, and 3 (install at your discretion) for Linux kit.

Google and Microsoft are applying automatic fixes to the integrated Adobe Flash Player code found in Chrome and in Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 8.

The updates resolve a permissions issue with the Flash Player Firefox sandbox (CVE-2013-0643), a vulnerability in the ExternalInterface ActionScript feature (CVE-2013-0648), and a buffer overflow vuln in the Flash Player broker service (CVE-2013-0504).

Links to download the fix are available from Adobe's website, as listed in the security bulletin.

The timing of the patch jars with Adobe's as-of-November-2012 commitment to try and issue security patches in a more measured pattern that coincides with Microsoft's Patch Tuesday. ®

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