"There are reports that the vulnerability is being exploited in the wild in active targeted attacks designed to trick the user into clicking on a malicious file delivered in an email message," the Friday said.
Although all editions of Flash Player contain the vulnerability and should be patched, the active exploit is targeting only users of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE).
Flash Player for IE is an ActiveX plug-in, the Microsoft-only standard; other browsers, including Firefox and Chrome, use a different plug-in structure.
The update was pegged with Adobe's priority rating of "1," used to label patches for actively-exploited vulnerabilities or bugs that will likely be exploited. For such updates, Adobe recommends that customers install the new version within 72 hours.
Adobe disclosed relatively few details about the vulnerability -- its usual practice -- other than to label it an "object confusion vulnerability," note the Common Vulnerabilities & Exposures ID of CVE-2012-0779, and acknowledge that triggering the bug "could cause the application to crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system."
It's unclear how extensive the active attacks are, although Adobe's calling them "targeted" hints at a low volume of attempts aimed at specific individuals or companies.
Today's Flash Player update was the fourth this year -- the latest before Friday was on March 28 -- putting the frequently-patched program on about the same pace as last year, when Adobe issued a total of nine Flash security updates.
In March, Adobe addressed the frequent updating pain point -- at least for Windows users -- by shipping Flash Player 11.2, which uses a mechanism. The silent update is supposed to kick in in some situations to automatically patch the plug-in in IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera on Windows without notifying or bothering users.
At the time, Adobe said it would switch on silent updates " on a case-by-case basis," but hinted that the service would primarily be used to distribute patches for zero-day vulnerabilities, such as today's.
Friday, Adobe confirmed that it has, in fact, enabled Flash silent updates for Windows in this instance.
A Computerworld Windows 7 system, however, was not silently updated to 11.2.202.235, the patched version, within an hour of booting the PC, the interval the tool uses to check for new updates. Adobe was unable to explain the problem, other than to suggest an initial failure by those browsers to connect to its servers. In that case, the silent updater is designed to stop pinging Adobe for 24 hours before resuming.
The current stable version of Chrome -- Google's browser is the only one that includes the Adobe software in its updates -- reports running the patched 11.2.202.235 edition of Flash Player. Google shipped that version of Chrome, 18.0.1025.168, on Monday, April 30, giving it a four-day jump on Adobe's plug-in patching.
It was Chrome's largest-ever lead: previously, to Flash Player patching by hours, or at most a day.
Adobe today again explained Chrome's faster Flash patching by noting that it hands Flash updates to Google as "soon as we updated the code," but needs more time on its part to test fixes on scores of operating system and browser combinations before it's confident enough to ship the update to all users.
Microsoft's vulnerability research group reported the Flash vulnerability to Adobe.
The patched versions of for Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris can be downloaded from Adobe's website. Windows users can wait for the silent updater to kick in, run Flash's update tool or wait for the software to prompt them that a new version is available.
Android users will be able to download the new version from Google Play, formerly the Android Market, later today, said Adobe.
To determine which version of Flash Player is running in any particular browser, users can steer to .
Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at , on or subscribe to . His email address is .
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