Dennis Fisher

If there was still any question that Adobe’s products have emerged as the prime targets for attackers right now, the events of the last week have removed any doubt. Within the space of six days, Adobe has been forced to release separate warnings about attacks targeting unpatched flaws in both its Reader and Flash Player products.

Researchers have identified a new botnet based in China that was openly selling DDoS-for-hire services and had managed to plant roots inside a number of major U.S. ISPs. The botnet, known as IMDDOS, is mostly contained right now and the researchers are working with authorities to locate its operators.

Although Adobe doesn’t have a patch ready yet for the newly disclosed vulnerability in the company’s Reader application, Adobe and Microsoft security officials said that Microsoft’s recently released Enhanced Mitigation Environment Toolkit 2.0 can protect users against the exploit that is currently circulating.

A pair of security researchers have implemented an attack that exploits the way that ASP.NET Web applications handle encrypted session cookies, a weakness that could enable an attacker to hijack users’ online banking sessions and cause other severe problems in vulnerable applications. Experts say that the bug, which will be discussed in detail at the Ekoparty conference in Argentina this week, affects millions of Web applications.

There are a number of other file types that can be used in the same kind of attacks that have been used in the DLL-hijacking exploit in recent weeks. Experts say that executable files, Windows INI files and some other file types can be used in these same attacks.

There appears to be an actual email worm in circulation right now, using the tried-and-true infection method of sending malicious emails to all of the names in a user’s email address book.

Attackers are using a previously unknown exploitation technique that bypasses both ASLR and DEP to exploit the unpatched Adobe Reader bug that Adobe warned users about on Wednesday. The exploit works on machines running either Windows Vista or Windows 7 and is also dropping a file on compromised machines that is signed using a stolen, valid digital certificate.