Tag Archives: Adobe

Deep Fakes are becoming an increasingly large problem. If you’re not familiar with the term, a Deep Fake is an advanced photo or video technique in which an existing person in a video is digitally overwritten by some other person.

Want to make it look like a wholesome actress has a porn video on the web? A Deep Fake will get the job done.

Want to make it look like a politician you can’t stand said something completely hypocritical? Have a Deep Fake video commissioned to make it look like the Politician in question said whatever you want him or her to say.

Or, on the financial front, if you want to tank a rival company’s stock price, you can make a Deep Fake video of the company’s CEO reporting an obviously disastrous course of action for his or her company.

These are just a few of the ways Deep Fakes are being used in the here and now, and the underground industry that’s producing this content is still in its infancy. So in the months and years ahead, we can expect to see much more of this type of thing, and in increasingly advanced forms.

Worst of all, people tend to believe the evidence in front of their eyes, so once a Deep Fake image or video starts making the rounds, it can spread like wildfire and quickly be accepted as the truth. After all, what could be more damning than actual video footage of a given event?

Except, of course, that Deep Fake specialists make a trade out of inventing fictions out of thin air and then building videos to support whatever story they want to push. It’s incredibly dangerous, and there are several companies working hard to come up with ways to spot Deep Fakes, Adobe included.

Recently, the company rolled out a new content attribution tool in Photoshop that’s been specifically designed to spot and combat Deep Fakes and the damage they can do. While it’s still in beta, it represents one of the first tangible steps big tech companies are beginning to take to fight a war they didn’t even know they were embroiled in. Kudos to Adobe for their work to this point.

If you make frequent use of Adobe products, then you’ll definitely want to give priority to applying the latest security update offered by the company. It’s an out of band patch that impacts ten different products in the Adobe lineup and is aimed squarely at addressing a number of critical security flaws. Since this is a big update, released outside the company’s normal schedule, let’s start by taking a look at exactly which products are impacted.

These include:

• Dreamweaver
• Marketo
• Animate
• Illustrator
• After Effects
• Photoshop
• Media Encoder
• InDesign
• Creative Cloud
• Premiere Pro

Right off the bat then, if you use any of the products listed above in either a Windows or MacOS environment, this patch is for you.

As to the particulars, the updates address too many issues listed as serious or critical to go into any detail on. However, in Illustrator for example, the patch addresses seven different critical security vulnerability.

In Dreamweaver, you’ll find a pair of serious issues addressed, including an uncontrolled search path element flaw, and similar bugs were addressed in Premier Pro, Photoshop, Media Encoder and Creative Cloud. On the Marketo front, the company addressed a critical cross-site scripting bug that could have allowed an attacker to deploy a poisoned JavaScript inside a browser section.

Where Animate is concerned, four different critical vulnerabilities were addressed, all of which could have resulted in arbitrary code execution. With InDesign, the company addressed a critical memory corruption bug.

In short, this is a massive, important update. It also didn’t happen in isolation. When the company released the update, they thanked a raft of security research firms for their efforts and disclosures. Again, if you use any of the Adobe products listed above, this is a security update you won’t want to miss.