Adobe Flash Player Security Update Available

Adobe yesterday evening released a security patch for Adobe Flash Player that fixes several critical security vulnerabilities. Affected are all versions of Adobe Flash Player 10.3.183.7 and earlier for all supported operating systems (Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Solaris) as well as Adobe Flash Player 10.3.186.6 and earlier for the Android operating system.

According to Adobe, attackers could use the vulnerabilities to exploit a crash to potentially take control of the attacked system. At least one of the vulnerabilities has already been detected in recent attacks, which makes the update mandatory and important on all systems. The attack is carried out over email, but Adobe points out that it can also be carried out on any website on the Internet.

The attacker basically tries to convince the user to click on a specifically prepared link to execute the attack on the user’s local computer system.

Adobe obviously recommends to update Adobe Flash Player as soon as possible to the latest version that fixes the discovered security issues.

Adobe Flash users can check their version of Adobe Flash Player on the about page over at Adobe.

Google Chrome users are the only ones who do not have to manually update Flash Player, as it is done automatically by Google Update.

Everyone else can download the most recent version of Adobe Flash Player from Adobe’s Download Center. Please note that you need to close your web browser during the installation process. Make sure that you uncheck the “Yes, install Google Chrome – optional” box on the download page unless you want to install Google Chrome as well.

You can alternatively download offline installers from the following links: for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer here, for Firefox, Opera and other browsers here.

You can access the changelog here. It lists all previous changes in Flash Player 10.3 and known issues among other things.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Thursday September 22, 2011 -
Tags:adobe, adobe flash player, flash player, flash player security, flash player update

Responses so far:

1. Jim says:

   September 22, 2011 at 5:35 pm

   HTML5 will fix this and give users one less thing to worry. Well, more than one actually, but this one in particular.

   Reply
2. TRY says:

   September 22, 2011 at 10:32 pm

   I hope so too, HTML5 must completely replace and phase out Adobe Flash – a result of bad programming.

   Regards

   Reply
3. Jack says:

   September 23, 2011 at 8:31 pm

   As usual, I needed the complete update files
   ( http://forums.adobe.com/thread/889580 )
   as the direct adobe flash update just wouldn’t work. Never has worked for me (Win7).

   Reply