Apple did send out a security message late today, citing that the company has taken the relevant steps to block out old versions of Adobe’s Flash Player plug-in when it comes to the Safari browser, with the reason behind this block being a recent flaw which carries the danger of letting hackers actually exploit data from the browser, cookies included.
An updated support document that touched on this particularly thorny issue saw Apple play the role of a pro-active party, after the recent discovery of a Flash vulnerability, through the restriction of this plug-in access via its Safari Web browser.
Those Safari browser owners who are still using out of date plug-ins will see the message as shown above, which reads, “Blocked plug-in,” “Flash Security Alert” or “Flash out-of-date” whenever one attempts to access Flash content in Safari. If you click on the alert, you will be greeted by Adobe’s Flash installer page so that you can go ahead to download and install the latest plug-in.
Adobe claims that this particular flaw can be found in Flash Player for Mac version 14.0.0.125 and earlier, and the company has since advised Mac users to perform an update so that it can bring up the version number to 14.0.0.145. Apple is not alone in this boat, since OS X, Windows and Linux builds of Flash also came under scrutiny by the bug.