Adobe has posted a security advisory for Adobe Reader, Acrobat and Flash Player. The company states that a critical vulnerability is present in the current versions of Flash Player (v9.0.159.0 and v10.0.22.87) for Windows, Macs and UNIX operating systems and the authplay.dll component that ships with Adobe Reader and Acrobat v9.x on the same operating systems.

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"...avoid untrusted websites using Flash"

What about flash ads in trusted websites? Can they be compromised?

Could someone post a more layman way of fixing this issue?

Adobe published this in their post,

“A critical vulnerability exists in the current versions of Flash Player (v9.0.159.0 and v10.0.22.87) for Windows, Macintosh and Linux operating systems, and the authplay.dll component that ships with Adobe Reader and Acrobat v9.x for Windows. This vulnerability (CVE-2009-1862) could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. There are reports that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild via limited, targeted attacks against Adobe Reader v9 on Windows.”

Thus, you should just remove the authplay.dll file and you are sorted.

Maybe ridding of Adobe as a whole would fix the issue.

Adobe already has a fix available online... which is more than can be said for most others that are infested.

just got new laptop am trying to download flash player, but it will not even load the page. Is this threat the cause of my problem?