Pierluigi Paganini
February 04, 2014
Adobe has released today a new patch for the Flash Player product to fix a vulnerability which is currently being exploited. The vulnerability (CVE-2014-0497), allows an attacker to remotely take control of the targeted system hosting Flash.
The security hole affects the version 12.0.0.43 and earlier for both Windows and Mac OSs and Adobe Flash Player 11.2.202.335 and earlier versions for Linux.
The vulnerability was discovered by two researchers at Kaspersky Lab, Alexander Polyakov and Anton Ivanov.
The story started some month ago, when the Kaspersky Team discovered a new sophisticated cyberespionage operation which has been going on at least since 2007. The operation dubbed “The Mask” hit systems in 27 countries leveraging high-end exploits, the attackers adopted an extremely sophisticated malware which includes a bootkit and rootkit. The malicious code used is able to infect also Mac and Linux versions and included a customized attack against Kaspersky products.
“This is putting them above Duqu in terms of sophistication, making it one of the most advanced threats at the moment. Most interesting, the authors appear to be native in yet another language which has been observed very rarely in APT attacks.We will present more details about the “Mask” APT next week at the Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit 2014 (on Twitter, #TheSAS2014). ” reports a post on SecureList blog.
Adobe was informed of the availability of an exploit in the wild used to hit systems running the Flash Player, it recommends users to update their product installations to the latest versions:
Stay tuned to receive more info in The Mask campaign.
UPDATE February 05 2014
It seems that CVE-2014-0497 is not linked with the Mask campaign …
