Adobe mimics Microsoft's monster patch Tuesday

 

Gallery

Posted on 14 Oct 2009 at 11:01

Adobe has released a bumper round of patches in its second monthly patch Tuesday, revealing the scale of the assault on its software.

The company patched 29 vulnerabilities in its software, with 13 of them tagged with the phrase "could potentially lead to arbitrary code execution" - a long-winded way of saying they could allow hackers to take control of your system.

"These vulnerabilities could cause the application to crash and could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system," says Adobe in the advisory accompanying the updates for Reader and Acrobat. "Updates apply to all platforms: Windows, Macintosh and Unix."

The remaining flaws could be used to crash computers, but would not compromise the machine's security, according to the company.

Despite adopting Microsoft's well-known Patch Tuesday monthly update cycle, Adobe does not apply the software giant's rating system to indicate the importance of individual patches.

Also included in the bulletins are fixes for the plug-ins used by Firefox, Chrome and Opera, which open the door to phishing attacks.

The patches follow a monster update by Microsoft which released 13 security bulletins covering a total of 34 flaws this week.