On June 4th, 2010 Adobe announced they had found a critical vulnerability in the currently shipping versions of Adobe Flash Player 9 and 10, an exploit that could cause crashes and possible control of the affected computer.
The latest release candidate of the Flash Player (candidate 7 of 10.1) does not appear to be vulnerable to this exploit and it seems version 8 and earlier are not affected either.
See Adobe’s official notice here:
http://www.adobe.com/support/security/advisories/apsa10-01.html
The link for the latest release candidate here:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/
If you would like to assume more control over when Flash material runs in your web browser, you may be interested in installing a Flash blocker plug-in for your browser. The blocker stops all Flash content by default but you can just click on any content you would like to see and then you can watch or interact with it as you normally would. You can even whitelist entire sites with most blocker plug-ins so you don’t have to click-to-load each Flash movie on that site. Blockers allow you to enjoy Flash content on the web but assume more control over what happens in your web browser.
Blocker for Apple Safari
Blocker for Firefox
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/433/
Blocker for Chrome
http://www.chromeextensions.org/appearance-functioning/flashblock/
Blocker for Microsoft Internet Explorer (not a plug-in, a built-in whitelist)
http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/disable-flash-all-but-whitelist-sites-ie8/
(Please use the browser appropriate for each link when clicking!)
