File-It-Under: System Flaws By:D.F.Skinner
Now you see why Apple shall not and never will support Adobe Flash on its mobile devices,its just prone to all types of attacks from bad guys. The latest incident is a critical attack which has Zero-Day vulnerability. Adobe's proprietary Flash Player is installed in both Windows and Mac systems by a large majority of computer owners,until the web itself adopts to the open HTML5 <video> tag, you have to settle with Adobe Flash,many developers still rely on the software to run videos on websites. This critical vulnerability can affect both Macs and the PC,yes even the Mac.
The exploit can cause system crashing and possibly allow attackers to gain control of your compromised system. Now the folks at Adobe the security advisory put out the usual press release stating that they are aware of the situation and is working on a possible solution. The exploit is a drive-by download attack against systems running Explorer and Firefox on Windows 8.1 and Windows 7.
The affected software versions in question includes the following: Adobe Flash Player 16.0.0.296 and earlier versions of Windows and Mac, 13.0.0.264 and earlier 13.x versions, and 11.2.202.440 and even earlier versions for Linux. You can check for yourself and see which version you have installed just by simply accessing the Adobe Flash Player page, or right click on content running Flash Player and select "About Adobe Flash Player". Its very important to make sure you check on each web browser you're running on your system.
The fix from Adobe won't take place until later on this week,no specific day or time has been given. The security gurus at Trend Micro and Microsoft had their hand in discovering such flaw.
Adobe and many other security gurus are advising that users disable Flash altogether, my advice would be to ditch Explorer and Firefox go with Google Chrome , its more secure and uses the latest video standard HTML 5.