In corporate environments, users generally do not have administrative rights to install or update software, making maintenance a challenge for the IT department.
To solve this problem, suppliers implement automatic update mechanisms that allow them to perform updates without user intervention.
However, these mechanisms need to raise their privileges to function, which makes them a target of interest for both security researchers and attackers.
In our laboratory, we discovered a vulnerability in the automatic update mechanism of Adobe Readeridentified as CVE-2024-39425.
This flaw allows a local attacker to gain SYSTEM privileges, bypassing User Account Control (UAC) and restrictions on non-administrator users. Although the exploit requires pre-existing access to the target machine and several complex steps, if successfully exploited it allows full control of the system to be taken.
We have reported this vulnerability to Adobe, which has released a corrective patch. We recommend that all users update their software to the latest available version to avoid possible attacks.
If you wish to learn more, here is the link to our full report.
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