Security holes trouble vendors

Vulnerabilities fixed in McAfee website and Google Chrome; patch expected for Adobe Reader.

A range of vulnerabilities have been causing headaches recently for companies including security vendor McAfee, the Internet browser arm of Google and PDF reader giant Adobe.

McAfee came in for criticism when it was discovered that McAfee Secure - the service that allows customers to check their sites for security vulnerabilities and for compliance with the PCI Data Security Standard - was itself exhibiting a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability. Something of an embarrassing oversight for a service that offers to check for exactly that type of problem. The McAfee Knowledge Center (which uses third-party software) was also taken offline due to a cross-site scripting vulnerability.

The security company has since fixed the vulnerabilities.

Meanwhile, Google recently released an update for its Chrome browser aimed at resolving two security issues: an error when processing bitmap data, which could be exploited to allow code injection and remote execution, and an integer multiplication checking bug which can be exploited to provoke an integer overflow, causing a browser crash or allowing code to be executed in the Chrome sandbox. Google rated the second of the two vulnerabilities as critical. All updates for Chrome are downloaded and installed automatically via an update function which does not require user interaction.

While all this has been going on, Adobe has been having problems with a critical zero-day vulnerability in its Adobe Reader 9.1 and Adobe Acrobat 9.1 products. An official advisory released on the first of the month urged users to disable JavaScript in the two products in order to mitigate the problem. However, the advice has been criticised by some administrators since the disabling instructions provided by the company act only as a temporary measure and the disabling can very easily be reversed, whether on purpose or by an unsuspecting user.

Adobe has pledged that it will release patches for the vulnerability on 12th May - which also happens to be the date of the next monthly release of updates from Microsoft.

07 May 2009

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