Adobe issued its first regularly-scheduled security updates on Tuesday, fixing at least 13 critical flaws reported by outside
researchers and secretly patching an unspecified number of bugs found by its own team.
Today's update to Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat comes three weeks after the company said it had revamped its security practices, and would root out vulnerabilities in old code, speed up its patching process and release regular
security updates for the often-attacked PDF applications.
At the time, Adobe announced it would piggyback its quarterly updates on Microsoft's monthly Patch Tuesday, but declined to set a start date. Last Thursday, however, the same day that Microsoft issued its usual advance notice of
impending patches, Adobe did the same.
"This is the first quarterly security update for Adobe Reader and Acrobat...and incorporates the initial output of code hardening
efforts," Wendy Poland of Adobe's security team in a brief post to the group's blog Tuesday. "Today's updates also address externally reported issues, as detailed in our Security Bulletin."
Poland said that Adobe wasn't aware of any in-the-wild exploits for the just-patched bugs.
As is its usual practice, Adobe described the 13 vulnerabilities reported by outsiders in terse terms. "This update resolves
multiple heap overflow vulnerabilities in the JBIG2 filter that could potentially lead to code execution," Adobe acknowledged
in the note accompanying six of the baker's dozen.
Adobe credited 10 researchers or organizations for reporting the Reader/Acrobat vulnerabilities, including the TippingPoint
bug bounty program, Apple's security team and Mark Dowd of IBM Internet Security Systems' X-Force, a researcher who frequently
roots out Adobe bugs.
But the company also acknowledged that it had plugged an unknown number of holes its own researchers uncovered. "Additionally,
this update resolves Adobe internally discovered issues," the security bulletin said near its end. Adobe offered no additional
information, such as the number, the severity and the nature of those bugs, however. Microsoft has been roundly criticized
in the past when researchers have suspected that it's secretly patching problems without giving users the usual amount of
information about the bugs.
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