But if the other person knew perfectly well what they were doing, and how to orchestrate it, and if they timed their “intervention” deliberately and maliciously, the outcome could be disastrous, and perhaps even career limiting. Even if that sort of thing happened entirely by accident, due to a genuine mistake by a trustworthy colleague, the outcome would probably be annoying, and might even be embarrassing. You’d end up blithely presenting someone else’s content as your own, with no inkling of the impending disaster. Imagine that you’re in the middle of a PowerPoint presentation that you’ve checked carefully and rehearsed plentifully, but just before you click through from slide 4 to slide 5, someone who thinks they’re updating slide 5 of their presentation manages to write their new data into your presentation instead. …only to carry on accessing that memory anyway, even after it’s been reallocated to some other part of the program, or perhaps even to another program entirely. Intriguingly, CVE-2022-0609 was only one of five use-after-free coding bugs fixed in this update.Ī use-after-free bug happens when one part of a program requests a block of memory to be reserved for its own exclusive access, uses that memory for a while, then relinquishes its claim on that memory block… Loosely put, the zero part of the jargon reminds you that there were zero days during which you could have been patched proactively, no matter how hard you tried, because the attackers got there first.Īnnoyingly, but perhaps understandingly, both Apple and Adobe made only the briefest of admissions about the zero-days they fixed.Īpple said simply that it was “aware of a report that may have been actively exploited”: In other words, no matter how quickly you update against a zero-day once the patch is announced, you know that someone – and you have to hope that it wasn’t you! – has already been attacked and pwned, even if they’re accustomed to patching promptly themselves.

Remember that a zero-day exploit is a security bypass (typically, one that allows Bad Guys to break in and run or implant software of their own choosing) that was discovered and abused by the attackers before the Good Guys found and fixed it. In the past few days, both Apple and Adobe have published software updates to close off zero-day security holes that were already being exploited by attackers.

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