SonicWALL UTM Research team found reports of new 0-day vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player 10 and the “authplay.dll” file that ships with Adobe Reader and Acrobat X products.

An attacker can exploit this vulnerability by enticing a user to open a crafted Excel spreadsheet (.xls), which contains a malicious Flash (.swf) file. Successful exploitation would allow for arbitrary code injection and execution with the privileges of the currently logged in user. Code injection that does not result in execution would terminate the application due to memory corruption.

The vulnerability has been assigned as CVE-2011-0609.

SonicWALL has released an IPS signature to detect and block known exploits targeting this vulnerability. The following signature was released to address this issue:

• 6349 – Adobe Flash Player Code Execution Attempt