14 DAY TRIAL // Recent security updates released for their products made company representatives come forward with explanations on how the whole patching process works. As it turns out, the fix itself is easy, most of the time being spent doing tests to prevent incompatibility malfunctions.
Because they realize the implications of a newly released fix, the company wants to make sure that their software won't cause any damage to the machines it runs on.
According to The Register, the vulnerability is fixed in a fairly short time, somewhere between 20 minutes and 8 hours, so you might be wondering what happens in the remaining time until the patch is released.
As it's revealed, the rest of the time, representing up to 6000 man hours, is spent testing the patched-up product on all the platforms it typically runs on. This process is necessary to make sure that users won't end up with constant BSODs.
Brad Arkin, Adobe's senior director of product security and privacy, revealed that “The last thing we want to do is ship a release that blue screens hundreds of millions of machines. This would be truly awful. That is something we absolutely can never afford to happen.”
Because weaknesses in their applications have been in many cases exploited by cybercriminals, they learned to improve the time in which a fix is issued. Now, they hope to improve even further as they are planning to upgrade their update mechanisms in order to discourage hackers from abusing the vulnerabilities found in Adobe commodities.
“The more users in the consumer environment that get updated effortlessly, the less attractive the target is to the bad guys who are investing money in the exploit. Staying up-to-date is really absolutely critical for our users,” Arkin further revealed for El Reg.
It's clearly a good thing that Adobe realizes the dangerous position which their customers are put into because of the flaws in their products, but until they perfect the mechanism we've mentioned before, make sure your applications are always up-to-date.
Adobe Flash Player 11.0.1.129 RC 1 / 10.3.183.10 is available for download here. Adobe Reader X is available for download here. Adobe Acrobat X 10.1.1 / 9.4.6 updates are available for download here.