Adobe has rolled out a series of security patches for versions of Flash Player mapping to Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Android.

In each case, the updates address 25 vulnerabilities that could either crash the application or enable an attacker to take control of the affected system.

"None of these are in the wild yet, so this looks like a general Flash security update," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle. "I think probably the more interesting aspect is the backend coordination with Microsoft. As you might recall, back in August, Adobe released a flash update, but [it] was not applicable to the Windows 8 users because IE 10 has Flash embedded, so that required Microsoft to release updates. It was about a month later that Microsoft finally released updates. [Microsoft's] release is going out today via Windows update, so everybody should be protected at this point."

[Related: A Sneak Peek at October's Microsoft Patch Tuesday]

The announcement was made one day in advance of Microsoft Patch Tuesday.

"On the one hand, it seem like it would make more sense to release this on Patch Tuesday, itself," added Storms. "But I speculate that the reason they went one day early is because there is a hack-in-the-box contest that starts in Malaysia on Oct. 10, so this is probably something that they want to get out in advance of that contest in order to have the latest and most secure browsers out there."

PUBLISHED OCT. 8, 2012