CVE-2009-4324 — Red Hat
HIGHCVE-2009-4324 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.8) Use After Free vulnerability. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2022-06-08) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. No vendor fix is recorded yet; mitigation options are listed below.
Use-after-free vulnerability in the Doc.media.newPlayer method in Multimedia.api in Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.x before 9.3, and 8.x before 8.2 on Windows and Mac OS X, allows remote…
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2022-06-08. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2022-06-22.
- A successful exploit gives an attacker total control of the affected component, not partial access.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA (KEV catalog and SSVC triage) for CVE-2009-4324.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2009-4324 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). In the shaded patch-first corner (EPSS 50%+, CVSS 7.0+).
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 395,249 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the 50–90% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
Use-after-free vulnerability in the Doc.media.newPlayer method in Multimedia.api in Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.x before 9.3, and 8.x before 8.2 on Windows and Mac OS X, allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via a crafted PDF file using ZLib compressed streams, as exploited in the wild in December 2009.
Affected Products
acrobatadobeacrobat readeradobeopensuseopensuselinux enterprisesuselinux enterprise debuginfosuseResearch use only. For defensive security, authorized penetration testing, and academic research only. Never execute exploit code against systems without explicit written authorization.
Adobe - 'Doc.media.newPlayer' Use-After-Free (Metasploit) (2)
by Metasploit · Sep 25, 2010
Adobe - 'Doc.media.newPlayer' Use-After-Free (Metasploit) (1)
by Metasploit · Apr 30, 2010
Adobe Reader / Acrobat - '.PDF' File Overflow
by Ahmed Obied · Dec 23, 2009
Detection & mitigation playbook
VulnerabilityDetect
Identify every host running the affected component and compare the installed build against the fixed version below — for source-built or distro-packaged software the version string, not a lockfile, is the source of truth (`dpkg -l`, `rpm -q`, or the binary's own `--version`).
Remediation status
No fixed release is recorded for CVE-2009-4324 yet. Track the upstream advisory, and apply the exposure-reduction steps below in the meantime.
Mitigate without a patch
Stop feeding it untrusted input: reject or quarantine files and payloads from unverified sources until you can upgrade, restrict accepted formats to the ones you actually need, and run the parsing or decoding step in a least-privileged sandbox or short-lived worker so a crash or corrupted read cannot reach the rest of the process.
Fixing This On Your OS
If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Extras for RHEL 3 | acroread-0:9.3-3 | RHSA-2010:0060 |
| Extras for RHEL 4 | acroread-0:9.3-1.el4 | RHSA-2010:0038 |
| Supplementary for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 | acroread-0:9.3-1.el5 | RHSA-2010:0037 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2009-4324 in your dependencies?
Find it across , including transitive dependencies.