Security threat found in widely used Adobe products
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06/07/2010
Adobe released a security bulletin late last Friday warning its users of a "critical vulnerability" in Adobe Flash Player 10.0.45.2 and some of its earlier versions.
The vulnerability, which the software manufacturer said in its advisory was "actively being exploited," may cause a system crash and enable a hacker to take over a user's computer.
Adobe acknowledged that its authplay.dll component was also affected. According to a Computer World report, the authplay.dll file is shipped with Windows copies of Reader and Acrobat, and reads Flash content in PDF files.
Users can delete, rename or remove the authplay.dll to alleviate the threats to Reader and Acrobat and exhibit safe desktop management, however Adobe reports that potential crashes or error messages may occur when "opening a PDF file that contains SWF content."
A more recent Adobe release, Flash Player 10.1, does not appear to be affected.
The Adobe vulnerability is similar to another security threat announced by the company last summer, Computer World reports, in which Flash Player, Reader and Acrobat were susceptible to potential attacks.
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