Adobe to patch Black Hat bugs on Thursday

Adobe plans to release out-of-sequence updates on Thursday (19 August) designed to patch security holes in its Acrobat and Reader PDF software revealed at the Black Hat conference earlier this month.

Updates for Adobe Reader 9.3.3 for Windows, Macintosh and Unix will accompany Adobe Acrobat 9.3.3 for Windows and Macintosh as well as cross-platform patches for Adobe Reader 8.2.3 and Acrobat 8.2.3 - earlier but still supported versions of the software applications. Thursday will also mark the availability of a cross-platform update for Adobe Flash Player 10.1.53.64.

Vulnerable versions of Acrobat bundle an at-risk version of Flash Player. Secondly an integer overflow error in CoolType.dll library packages creates a critical code injection flaw, as explained in an advisory by Secunia here. Both bugs were discovered by Charlie Miller, of Independent Security Evaluators.

Adobe's next quarterly security update falls on 12 October but the Black Hat bugs were too serious to wait for that, hence the decision to push out an earlier release. More details on the planned update can be found in Adobe's advisory here.

Attacks against Adobe's applications are second only to Microsoft as the favourite target for hacker attackers. Adobe is putting a lot of effort into improving its patching and security process but the results, for now at least, remain unseasoned. The software maker's frequent security updates are a little hard to stomach as a result. ®