New zero-day vulnerabilities discovered in Flash Player

Two newly discovered vulnerabilities in Adobe's Flash Player can be exploited to execute arbitrary code remotely, according to advisories from the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) and various security research companies.

The security flaws were discovered by Russian vulnerability research firm Intevydis, which integrated exploits for them in its Vulndisco module for Immunity Canvas, a popular penetration-testing application.

Intevydis has no plans to notify Adobe about these vulnerabilities, company founder and CEO Evgeny Legerov said. Two years ago, Legerov announced that his company will no longer notify vendors about the vulnerabilities it discovers.

Intevydis is not the only security company that adopted the "no more free bugs" approach. French vulnerability research firm Vupen is also an adept of this philosophy and only shares information about the security issues it discovers with its paying customers.

The exploits developed by Intevydis for the two zero-day Flash Player vulnerabilities can bypass Windows anti-exploitation features including DEP and ASLR, and can escape the Internet Explorer sandbox, Legerov wrote on the Immunity mailing list last week.

The company also published a video showing the exploits in action on Windows and promised to release Mac OS X implementations as well.

Flash Player vulnerabilities can be exploited by embedding maliciously-crafted Flash content into websites or PDF documents. Adobe Reader and Acrobat are generally affected by Flash Player flaws because they incorporate a Flash playback component.

Adobe hasn't issued an advisory for these two vulnerabilities yet and it didn't immediately return a request for comment. The company is already working on a patch for a different zero-day vulnerability in Adobe Reader which is scheduled for next week.

Antivirus companies and intrusion detection system providers have yet to create signatures for these exploits, according to the SANS Internet Storm Center (ISC). In the meantime there's a risk that ill-intentioned individuals could reverse engineer Intevydis' exploits.

At this time, no attacks exploiting these Flash Player vulnerabilities have been detected in the wild, but security-conscious users might want to use Flash blocking technologies in their browsers and disable Flash support in Adobe Reader until a patch becomes available.