CVE-2010-2883 — Red Hat
HIGHCVE-2010-2883 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.3) Out-of-bounds Write 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.
Stack-based buffer overflow in CoolType.dll in Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.x before 9.4, and 8.x before 8.2.5 on Windows and Mac OS X, allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code…
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-2010-2883.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2010-2883 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
Stack-based buffer overflow in CoolType.dll in Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.x before 9.4, and 8.x before 8.2.5 on Windows and Mac OS X, allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service (application crash) via a PDF document with a long field in a Smart INdependent Glyphlets (SING) table in a TTF font, as exploited in the wild in September 2010. NOTE: some of these details are obtained from third party information.
Affected Products
acrobatadobeacrobat readeradobeResearch use only. For defensive security, authorized penetration testing, and academic research only. Never execute exploit code against systems without explicit written authorization.
Adobe CoolType - SING Table 'uniqueName' Remote Stack Buffer Overflow (Metasploit) (1)
by Metasploit · Sep 20, 2010
Adobe CoolType - SING Table 'uniqueName' Local Stack Buffer Overflow (Metasploit) (2)
by Metasploit · Sep 25, 2010
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-2010-2883 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 4 | acroread-0:9.4.0-1.el4 | RHSA-2010:0743 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2010-2883 in your dependencies?
Find it across , including transitive dependencies.