Adobe fixes 4 critical Reader bugs that were demonstrated at Tianfu Cup

Adobe released security updates to address multiple vulnerabilities affecting several products, including Acrobat and Reader.

Adobe patches for January address 41 vulnerabilities in Windows and macOS versions of Acrobat and Reader products, Illustrator, Adobe Bridge, InCopy, and InDesign. 22 of these vulnerabilities were reported through the ZDI program.

The software giant fixed a total of 26 flaws in Acrobat and Reader, the most severe ones are remote code execution (RCE) that were demonstrated at the Tianfu Cup. An attacker can exploit these vulnerabilitied by tricking the victim into opening a specially crafted PDF.

The four critical vulnerabilities that were demonstrated at the Chinese Tianfu Cup hacking contest are CVE-2021-44704, CVE-2021-44705, CVE-2021-44706, and CVE-2021-44707 (CVSS base score 7.8). The white hat hackers that demonstrated the issues in the Reader product earned a total of $150,000.

Other flaws in Acrobat and Reader can be exploited by attackers for privilege escalation, bypassing security features, triggering a DoS condition, and retrieving data from memory.

Adobe released security updates for InCopy that address three Critical-rated RCE flaws and one Important-rated privilege escalation issue. The updates for InDesign fixes two Critical-rated Out-of-bounds (OOB) Write flaws that could be exploited to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable systems and a Moderate Use-After-Free privilege escalation. The update for Bridge addresses six flaws, one of them in OOB Write is rated as Critical. The company also fixed two OOB Read bugs in Illustrator.

The company said that it is not aware of attacks in the wild exploiting the above issues.

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, IKEA)