Adobe patches 2 Shockwave security holes that could give control of your PC or Mac to others

By Konrad Krawczyk February 12, 2014

adobe fixes two shockwave player security holes abd05a92ae26ea7ed8e41edb4a153342 — Image used with permission by copyright holder

If you use Adobe Shockwave Player on your PC or Mac, then you may need to address this issue quickly. Adobe just patched the program with a significant security update.

An official Adobe Security Bulletin post indicates that the firm has released a security fix for Adobe Shockwave Player 12.0.7.148. The fix also applies to earlier versions of the program, and applies to both Mac and PC users. According to Adobe’s post, the fix addresses a pair of vulnerabilities found within the program that could give a hacker permission to remotely take control of the system on which the flawed Adobe Shockwave Player installations reside.

The security holes were discovered by Liangliang Song, a researcher with Fortinet’s FortiGuard Labs, a firm that specializes in network security and research. Once Song discovered the vulnerabilities, the firm reported them to Adobe.

Though Adobe Shockwave Player isn’t as widely used or as popular as Adobe Flash, the company states that it’s installed on 450 million computers worldwide, so the threat and danger posed by the existence of these vulnerabilities is quite significant.

In order to get the fix, you simply need to download and install the latest version of Adobe Shockwave Player, which you can do so here.

What do you think? Sound off in the comments below.

Editors' Recommendations

Konrad Krawczyk

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Konrad covers desktops, laptops, tablets, sports tech and subjects in between for Digital Trends. Prior to joining DT, he…

Computing

Razer mice could give hackers wide-open local access to your Windows PC

Razer Viper Ultimate Mouse

The security problems just keep coming for Windows. In the latest, a hacker has discovered that by simply using a Razer mouse, someone with bad intent who already has full physical access to your PC can run their own payloads and even abuse and enter the PowerShell command terminal.

A bit like the ongoing PrintNightmare vulnerability issue of injecting bad drivers via Point and Print, this new flaw has to deal with the way that Razer's gaming software works. Once a Razer mouse is plugged into a PC, Windows Update downloads and runs a "Razer installer" as a system process. This installer then allows hackers to open an elevated version of Windows Explorer to choose where to install drivers, and they can simply then open PowerShell by pressing the Shift and the right-click buttons on the keyboard. You can see this in action below.

Computing

You’ve had Apple Silicon in your Mac for years, and it’s called the T2 chip

Apple T2 iMac Chip

The Intel era of Mac computers is coming to an end, and for good reason. In the past five years, MacBooks and iMacs have had a harder time standing out from the competition than Apple products normally do. After all, if Macs use all of the same components that other laptops do, what sets them apart? Apple has its own software in MacOS, yes, but from a hardware perspective, there are limitations.

That's where the T2 chip came into play. From the Touch Bar on the MacBook Pro to improved webcams and speakers on the latest iMac, the T2 chip has been the magic behind the Mac for years. It was the Apple Silicon before Apple Silicon existed -- and it just might give us a preview of the future of the Mac.
The humble beginnings of Apple Silicon

Computing

ZombieLoad is Meltdown resurrected. Here’s how to secure your PC right now

Stock photo of Intel 9th gen core processor.

Less than a year and a half since Intel had its first public meltdown after finding the highly publicized Meltdown and Spectre security flaws, researchers have discovered a new security vulnerability called Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) -- which leaves computers dating back to 2008 vulnerable to eavesdropping attacks.

Fortunately, Intel learned its lesson from the first Meltdown discovery, and it finds itself better prepared to address the recently published security flaw that, if unpatched, could leave computers -- ranging from laptops to cloud-based servers -- exposed to eavesdropping by an attacker.
Back from the grave
A series of updates were recently deployed to address the newly uncovered security flaw. Whether you're on a Windows PC or a Mac, you should stay up to date with your security patches to mitigate the risk of attack. Business customers operating their infrastructure from the cloud should check with their service providers to ensure that that latest available security patches will be applied as soon as possible.