Adobe backs down, will secure last generation of apps
Late last week, Adobe set off a bit of a kerfuffle when it announced that three of its applications suffered from serious security flaws. They offered readers a simple fix: pay to upgrade to the latest version. Considering the latest version of the company's Creative Suite was less than a week old at the time, this represented both an extremely short period of support for the previous generation of software, and an extremely high price to fix a set of potential vulnerabilities. The move was widely panned by both security experts and Adobe customers.
In response to the negative press, the company has reversed course. On Friday, the company's security bulletins for Flash, Illustrator, and Photoshop were updated to indicate that the company is "in the process of resolving these vulnerabilities in Adobe Photoshop CS5.x, and will update this Security Bulletin once the patch is available." All of the vulnerabilities could potentially allow an attacker to arbitrarily execute code by corrupting memory. In the case of Photoshop, the application was vulnerable to maliciously crafted TIFF files.
