Adobe patches six critical flaws in Shockwave Player

IDG News Service - Adobe has fixed six critical vulnerabilities in Shockwave Player that could potentially be exploited by attackers to execute malicious code, via the release of version 11.6.8.638 of the software.

Five of the patched flaws are buffer overflow vulnerabilities and one is an out-of-bounds array bug. Adobe credits Will Dormann of CERT and Honggang Ren of Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs with reporting the issues.

"Adobe recommends users of Adobe Shockwave Player 11.6.7.637 and earlier versions update to the newest version 11.6.8.638," the company said in a security advisory accompanying the release on Tuesday. The new version is available for the Windows and Mac platforms.

"Adobe is not aware of any exploits in the wild for any of the issues patched in this release," Wiebke Lips, Adobe's senior manager of corporate communications, said via email.

While not nearly as popular as Flash Player, Shockwave Player is installed on 450 million Internet-enabled desktops, according to Adobe, which might make it an attractive target for attackers. The product is required to display online content created with Adobe's Director software, like 3D games, product demonstrations, simulations or e-learning courses, inside browsers.