CVE-2014-8439 — AIR
HIGHCVE-2014-8439 is a high-severity (CVSS 8.8) Buffer Overflow vulnerability in adobe air. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2022-05-25) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. A fix is available — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Adobe Flash Player before 13.0.0.258 and 14.x and 15.x before 15.0.0.239 on Windows and OS X and before 11.2.202.424 on Linux, Adobe AIR before 15.0.0.293, Adobe AIR SDK before 15.0.0.302,…
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2022-05-25. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2022-06-15.
- 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-2014-8439.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2014-8439 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 395,249 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the 10–50% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
Adobe Flash Player before 13.0.0.258 and 14.x and 15.x before 15.0.0.239 on Windows and OS X and before 11.2.202.424 on Linux, Adobe AIR before 15.0.0.293, Adobe AIR SDK before 15.0.0.302, and Adobe AIR SDK & Compiler before 15.0.0.302 allow attackers to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service (invalid pointer dereference) via unspecified vectors.
Affected Products
airadobeair sdkadobeair sdk \& compileradobeflash playeradobeResearch use only. For defensive security, authorized penetration testing, and academic research only. Never execute exploit code against systems without explicit written authorization.
Detection & mitigation playbook
Vendor / applianceDetect
Inventory every adobe air deployment and check each version against the affected-products list above.
Fix
Apply the adobe air security patch or hotfix for CVE-2014-8439 on the affected version, following the vendor advisory for your exact build.
Workarounds
Constrain what reaches the vulnerable code: limit the size and shape of untrusted input, isolate the affected component in a sandboxed or least-privileged process, and enable the platform's memory-safety mitigations (ASLR, stack protector, hardened allocator) so an out-of-bounds access is more likely to fail closed than to be exploitable. Alongside that, restrict the management interface to trusted networks and apply the vendor's recommended configuration mitigations.
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 |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Supplementary | flash-plugin-0:11.2.202.424-1.el5 | RHSA-2014:1915 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2014-8439 being exploited in your environment?
Detect and block the exploit chain at execution, on systems you cannot patch yet.