Didn't you know? Today's Patch Thursday! Adobe splats hijack bug in Shockwave Player

Adobe has updated its Shockwave Player to close a security hole that could allow hackers to hijack vulnerable Windows and OS X computers.

The Photoshop giant said version 12.1.150 will address a flaw that enables an attacker to potentially remotely control a targeted system: a malicious file opened by Shockwave could exploit a memory corruption bug to perform remote code execution. Given the animation player runs in the user's browser, it would be trivial to take a swipe at passing web visitors.

The company said the flaw is present in the Windows and OS X versions of Shockwave Player, which is apparently installed on 450 million machines worldwide. No exploits targeting the flaw have been spotted as of yet. Discovery of the flaw was credited to Honggang Ren of FortiGuard Labs. The CVE ID assigned to the bug, CVE-2014-0505, was created on December 20 last year.

This critical Shockwave update comes two days after Adobe released a separate fix for a security vulnerability in its Flash Player software; such updates usually come out on the second Tuesday of every month to coincide with Microsoft's monthly Patch Tuesday security releases.

"At this time, only Adobe Reader, Acrobat and Flash are officially on a Patch Tuesday release schedule," an Adobe spokesperson told The Reg.

"We try to schedule security updates for other Adobe products on Patch Tuesdays as much as possible. In some instances, however, there are factors (such as engineering schedules) that require us to release updates on different dates."

Users can obtain the latest patched version of Shockwave Player from Adobe's Shockwave download site. Those who have not yet installed this month's Patch Tuesday updates, released earlier this week by Adobe and Microsoft, are encouraged to do so. ®