I don’t think about Adobe Flash much. I just use it. I think that’s the case for most of us. Almost all the video on the Web is in Flash, and we just take it for granted. That’s a mistake. Like any other popular application, it can be an easy way for a cracker to hack into your computer.
Take Adobe Flash’s latest round of patches. Adobe doesn’t say a lot about exactly what it’s fixing in its security advisory, but out of the seven security bugs they’re fixing, six of the repairs are on problems that “could potentially lead to code execution.”
That’s a fancy way of saying that they could be used to bust into your PC. Once there, they could install malware, rip off your personal data, and in general make your life a living hell.