"Adobe Illustrator Vulnerabilities Rated Critical, But Exploitation Not Easy"

Updates released by Adobe recently for its Illustrator product patch two vulnerabilities that could lead to arbitrary code execution, but the researcher who found them says exploitation is not easy.  According to Adobe, Illustrator 2021 and 2022 for Windows and macOS are affected by improper input validation and out-of-bounds read vulnerabilities that could lead to malicious code execution.  Adobe assigned the flaws a critical severity rating.  Based on their CVSS score, the vulnerabilities are high severity.  The issues were reported to Adobe through Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) by Tran Van Khang, malware analyst in the services division of Vietnam-based cybersecurity firm VinCSS, a subsidiary of Vingroup.  ZDI revealed that the vulnerabilities are related to the parsing of PCX and CDR files.  Khang noted that an attacker would need to send a malformed file to the targeted user and convince them to open the file using a vulnerable version of Illustrator to exploit the vulnerability.  In addition to the social engineering component, exploitation of the vulnerability is not easy due to the need to bypass memory protection mechanisms in Windows, such as DEP and ASLR.  Adobe assigned the flaws a priority rating of 3, which indicates that the software giant does not expect them to be exploited in malicious attacks.  This is the seventh round of Illustrator updates announced by Adobe in 2022.  More than 40 security holes have been patched in the product this year.

SecurityWeek reports: "Adobe Illustrator Vulnerabilities Rated Critical, But Exploitation Not Easy"