Adobe has released a critical patch for its Flash and AIR applications, following the discovery of yet more serious security vulnerabilities in the software.

Affecting users of Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Chrome OS and Android, the flaws include four memory corruption vulnerabilities, an integer overflow vulnerability, and a cross-domain information leakage issue. You should be careful resorting to other methods to get Flash back, though, as multiple malicious Flash .apk files have been making rounds across the internet.

In its notification regarding the updates, Adobe admitted to the seriousness of the issues. 'These updates address vulnerabilities that could case a crash,' the company explained, 'and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.'

That latter, of course, is the key: while system crashes are irritating, the flaws in Flash and AIR mean that an attacker could potentially load a malicious file into a website and automatically execute arbitrary code on visiting systems - potentially taking full control of the targets with very little effort.