Heap Spraying with Actionscript

Via FireEyes Malware Intelligence Lab -

As you may have heard, there's a new Adobe PDF-or-Flash-or-something 0-day in the wild. So this is a quick note about how it's implemented, but this blog post is not going to cover any details about the exploit itself.

Most of the Acrobat exploits over the last several months use the, now common, heap spraying technique, implemented in Javascript/ECMAscript, a Turing complete language that Adobe thought would go well with static documents. (Cause that went so well for Postscript) (Ironically, PDF has now come full circle back to having the features of Postscript that it was trying to get away from.) The exploit could be made far far less reliable, by disabling Javascript in your Adobe Acrobat Reader.

But apparently there's no easy way to disable Flash through the UI. US-CERT recommends renaming the %ProgramFiles%\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader\authplay.dll and %ProgramFiles%\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader\rt3d.dll files. [Edit: Actually the source for this advice is the Adobe Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT).]

Anyway, here's why… Flash has it's own version of ECMAScript called Actionscript, and whoever wrote this new 0-day, finally did something new by implementing the heap-spray routine with Actionscript inside of Flash.