Adobe Flash under zero-day exploit shadow

Adobe recently published a security advisory concerning a critical flaw that was unearthed in the latest Flash Player, where the vulnerability actually affects Flash Player for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, and Android platforms – now that’s a whole lot! Apart from that, it also involves the authplay.dll component that is included in Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader X. Should one successfully exploit the Flash vulnerability, a system crash would result, and there is also the possibility of the attacker taking complete control of the affected system. According to Adobe, the flaw is being actively exploited in the wild under the guise of targeted attacks using a malicious Flash file (SWF) that is embedded in a Microsoft Excel (XLS) e-mail file attachment. Needless to say, Adobe is already working round the clock to fix this exploit, but an update is expected only next week at the earliest, so do be extra careful in the mean time.