CVE-2021-40759
Published: 18 November 2021
Summary
CVE-2021-40759 is a high-severity Access of Memory Location After End of Buffer (CWE-788) vulnerability in Adobe After Effects. Its CVSS base score is 7.8 (High).
Operationally, ranked in the top 24.2% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2021-27924
Vulnerability details
Adobe After Effects version 18.4.1 (and earlier) is affected by a memory corruption vulnerability due to insecure handling of a malicious .m4a file, potentially resulting in arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user. User interaction is required…
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in that the victim must open a specially crafted file to exploit this vulnerability.
- CWE(s)
Related Threats
No named actor attribution yet. ATT&CK technique mapping in progress for this CVE.
Affected Assets
Mitigating Controls
Likely Mitigating Controls AI
Per-CVE control mapping for this CVE has not run yet; the list below is derived from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry.
Ongoing control assessments and code testing (static/dynamic analysis, fuzzing) surface memory buffer restriction failures, which are then remediated before release.
Managed runtimes used by platform-independent applications (e.g., JVM, CLR) enforce memory safety, preventing most buffer overflows that require direct memory manipulation.
Memory protections (e.g., W^X, ASLR) make exploitation of buffer-boundary violations far harder to turn into code execution.
Detects exploitation attempts that produce memory corruption, crashes, or anomalous behavior.