Adobe Flash Player 20.0.0.286: New Fixes and the Importance of Timely Update

Despite the global move to HTML5 for content streaming and development of interactive websites, Adobe still supports Flash on multiple platforms and web browsers. The company has just released the version 20.0.0.286, and users who still haven’t done so are encouraged to update as soon as possible.

Here is a complete list of fixes:

• [Sound] Timelines with multiple layers are unable to stop playing sound [4103304]
• [ActiveX] VB6 Fusion Charts are not loading in Flash Player [4098809]
• [ActiveX] Unable to play local SWF files in Flash Player 20 using ‘file’ protocol [4101067]

Download the Latest Flash Player

As usually, the latest version of Adobe Flash Player can be downloaded from its official website. If you are using Google Chrome, you will receive the update automatically.

The Importance of Updates

Adobe Flash Player is often considered to be one of the most vulnerable software in use today. The year 2015 was by far the worst of them all. Security researchers discovered a total of 314 vulnerabilities. Out of these, 268 were related to code execution issues and 82 to DoS attacks. This statistic is particularly startling when you realize that Adobe estimates that Flash is now on more than 1 billion devices. What’s more, App Store and Google Play Store feature 20,000 apps and games that rely on Flash as the core technology they are built with.

But the worst part is that an average user takes up to 6 weeks before updating to the latest version. This may not seem like too long, but the world of informational technology moves at such high speed that attackers have plenty of time to exploit unpatched vulnerabilities and exploit unknowing users.

Part of this problem is the fact that many programs that use Flash update only when they are freshly started. However, users are getting increasingly used to leaving their computers and portable devices running for a long time, and only rarely performing a hard shutdown or restart. This means that even if an update is available, it might not be installed before it’s already too late.

Users have to take the responsibility for their own security and ensure that they are always running the latest version of Adobe Flash Player and other critical pieces of software. It takes just a few minutes to manually check which version is installed, and the consequences of not doing so could be drastic.