Adobe Flash Player 11.5 Released – Critical Security Updates and Fixes

Adobe have released Flash Player 11.5 with many security updates and fixes – the release is a week early due to the critical nature of the flaws. Most websites use Flash Player to display multimedia content e.g. you may need it to watch streaming videos like those on YouTube so you probably already have it installed on your PC.

The new version 11.5 also includes a variety of technical changes and new features. As usual, installing the latest version is highly recommended (if only for security reasons). Flash Player 11.5 includes critical updates to address vulnerabilities that could cause Flash Player to crash or let an attacker take control of your computer.

Users who have set Flash Player to receive updates automatically should already have received this update (or will do soon). For other users, updates for Windows and Mac can be downloaded from Adobe here. Linux users should update to 11.2.202.251 whilst Android users should upgrade to the latest 11.1.115.27 (Android 4.x) or 11.1.111.24 (Android 3.x and lower).

Google Chrome contains an integrated Flash Player which is updated automatically so there is no need to apply any specific Adobe updates, just keep Chrome up to date. We have previously explained why you should update Flash Player and it is particularly important to install security updates as it is so regularly targeted by viruses and hackers.

There are many other changes in 11.5 – overall, twenty issues have been fixed (see the Release Notes for full details). In addition there are some new technical features of interest mainly to developers.

Conclusion

Flash Player seems to have been in a real mess over the last few months with constant new updates causing serious issues for many users of both Chrome and Firefox, as well as IE. Hopefully this new version may fix some of those problems – and not introduce others.

The increasing frequency of critical security updates can be seen as either a good sign that Adobe are actively closing loopholes or as an indication of how often Flash Player is targeted by malware creators – in the latest Kaspersky malware report, Flash Player was responsible for 3 of the top 10 most common vulnerabilities found. Furthermore, 5 out of the top 10 vulnerabilities were found in Adobe products.

7 thoughts on “Adobe Flash Player 11.5 Released – Critical Security Updates and Fixes”

  1. i just uninstalled and reinstalled Google Chrome and it use to have to shockwave flash player one with pepper flash and one that didnt , so i could go back in forth with enable and disable when trying to play games on facebook.. now it only has pepperflash it wont stop crashing…. to i add another flash player or do what i did b4 ????????????

  2. I’ve turned off protected mode in the Flash mms.cfg file, and it runs, sort of reasonable It doesn’t stutter, but it still isn’t running as smooth as it did pre-updates

  3. Unfortunately it doesn’t work for me. As I said, the new Flash version 11.5 works fine with IE, but with Chrome it no longer works properly. It did before the latest updates, Chrome ran fine with it – no problems. In fact this is the first issue I’ve had with Chrome since starting to use it as soon as it came out. Now though, the inbuilt Pepper plugin makes sound stutter, but the Adobe system drivers work ok apart from crashing if I scroll the video off the screen. So IT IS the new Flash update that is the problem – not my sound/graphics drivers.

    • if you become desperate to use Chrome (no idea when/if this will be fixed) you could uninstall non-IE flash 11.5 and reinstall non-IE Flash 11.4 (download old version from Filehippo.com etc)

      then disable Pepper so you’d just be running adobe 11.4 again [but you won’t have the 11.5 security updates]

  4. The latest version of Flash Player plugin does not work properly in the latest version of Google Chrome on my XP Acer Laptop. It causes stuttering in the sound. If I revert to the system player everything works until I scroll the player off the screen then it stops. If I use an earlier version everything works fine in YouTube but Chrome blocks/wont play in Facebook. It all worked fine before this version of Flash, now I’m having to resort to using IE and I hate the bloody browser!

    • Ditto on IE ;-)

      Pepper and Adobe Flash work ok for me but on an XP PC – maybe the new Chrome 23 accelerated video decoding is causing a problem on your laptop? Worth checking sound/graphics drivers for updates but otherwise it may be yet another bug in Flash

      Hopefully Google/Adobe will get a fix out… You could always try Firefox instead of IE?

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