Adobe releases patch schedule for critical flaw

Software maker to release an accelerated update fixing a critical vulnerability and a number of others.

Adobe late Monday released a patch schedule to fix a critical vulnerability in its Flash Player, Adobe Reader and Acrobat products.

The company said it plans to release a security update for Flash Player 10.x for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux by Thursday. It hasn’t yet determined when it will release an update for Flash Player 10 for Solaris, but it expects to provide a patch for Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.3.2 for Windows, Macintosh and UNIX by June 29.

In a blog post Monday night, Brad Arkin, director of product security and privacy at Adobe, said the June 29 update represents an accelerated release of Adobe’s quarterly update that was originally scheduled for July 13. The June 29 release will fix a number of other vulnerabilities in addition to the flaw announced Friday.

“Among other options, we also considered the alternative of releasing a one-off zero-day fix followed a couple of weeks later by the July 13 quarterly update,” Arkin wrote. “However, two patches within three weeks would have incurred too much churn and patch management overhead on our users, in particular for customers with large managed environments.”