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Adobe this afternoon pushed out a Flash Player update patching 11 critical security vulnerabilities, most of which lead to remote code execution. None are being publicly exploited, Adobe said. Versions 16.0.0.305 and earlier of the Flash Player Desktop and Flash Player for Google Chrome are affected on Windows and Mac OS X machines, as is Flash Player for Internet Explorer 10 and 11 on Windows 8 and 8.1 computers. Flash Player 11.2.202.442 for Linux and Flash Player Extended Support Release 13.0.0.269 for Windows and Mac OS X are also affected. The updated Flash Player includes patches for four memory corruption vulnerabilities, three of which reported by Google’s Project Zero, that lead to remote code execution. Two other type-confusion vulnerabilities, two use-after free vulnerabilities and an integer-overflow vulnerability were also patched; all could have resulted in remote code execution as well, Adobe said. The update also patches a cross-domain policy bypass vulnerability and a file-upload restriction bypass vulnerability. Today’s Adobe patches come on the heels of a busy week for IT administrators following Microsoft’s security bulletin rollout on Tuesday. Microsoft released 14 bulletins, five of them critical, and included patches for the FREAK vulnerability and a new fix for some unresolved issues left behind by the Stuxnet patch of 2010. Source

Ubuntu has released a number of patches for security vulnerabilities in several versions of the OS, including some remote code execution flaws in Thunderbird, which is included with Ubuntu. Thunderbird is Mozilla’s email client, and the company recently fixed several memory corruption vulnerabilities, along with a cross-site request forgery bug and a flaw that could lead to a session-fixation attack. “If a user were tricked in to opening a specially crafted message with scripting enabled, an attacker could potentially exploit these to cause a denial of service via application crash, or execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user invoking Thunderbird,” the Ubuntu advisory says, referring to the memory corruption vulnerabilities. The CSRF weakness in Thunderbird could be exploited if an attacker can get a user to open a malicious message while scripting is enabled. The session-fixation attack could occur under some circumstances if a user is connected to a malicious web proxy. In addition to the Thunderbird vulnerabilities, there are also patches for several other flaws in Ubuntu. One of the patches fixes a bug in libssh that could cause a denial of service. “It was discovered that libssh incorrectly handled certain kexinit packets. A remote attacker could possibly use this issue to cause libssh to crash, resulting in a denial of service,” the advisory says. There are also two vulnerabilities in the RPM package that could let a local attacker execute arbitrary code and a bug in libevent that could allow code execution in some cases. “Andrew Bartlett discovered that libevent incorrectly handled large inputs to the evbuffer API. A remote attacker could possibly use this issue with an application that uses libevent to cause a denial of service, or possibly execute arbitrary code,” the Ubuntu advisory says. Source