Hey Look, Another Emergency Update for Adobe Flash Player

The web can't move away from Adobe's Flash Player fast enough. Though efforts have been made to leave Flash behind, it's still a prominent part of the web. It's also still prone to what seems like an endless discovery of security holes. To that end, Adobe has released another update for its Flash Player, one that patches up no less than 23 security holes.

The update addresses vulnerabilities labeled as critical, one of which Adobe said it's aware is being actively exploited in the wild in limited, targeted attacks. Left unpatched, the vulnerabilities could potentially allow an attacker to control of an affected system.

Anyone running Adobe Flash Player version 20.0.0.306 or earlier should apply the update right way. That includes not only Windows users, but also Mac OS X, Linux, and Chrome OS users as well. If you're not sure which version you have installed, you can check on Adobe's website.

This is the latest in a string of security threats discovered in Flash Player. The web at large is making a concerted effort to move away from Flash—Google is banning Flash-based ads by 2017, YouTube already punted Flash in favor of HTML5, and and Twitch had begun phasing out Flash Player for HTML back in 2015, to name just a few examples.

In 2015, McAfee noted a 317 percent increase in new Adobe Flash malware in the first quarter of the year. More recently, McAfee said (PDF) that "application vulnerabilities are an ongoing problem for software developers and their customers," and that "Adobe Flash is perhaps the most frequently attacked product."