Adobe has upgraded its Flash Player to fix seven vulnerabilities in the graphics and video software widely used for interactive Web pages and banner advertisements.

Adobe classifies the patches as "critical" and advises people upgrade to the latest version, 9.0.124.0. All of the vulnerabilities could allow a hacker to execute code on a machine.

Exploiting vulnerabilities in Flash software has become an increasingly popular vector for hackers to compromise machines for two reasons. Most Web browsers have the Flash Player installed, and malicious banner advertisements -- which can achieve wide distribution on Web sites pulling ads from a network -- can take advantage of those vulnerabilities.

"These vulnerabilities could be accessed through content delivered from a remote location via the user's Web browser, e-mail client, or other applications that include or reference the Flash Player," Adobe wrote in its advisory.

If a malicious banner advertisement is widely distributed, a hacker has the potential to take control of many PCs. Lately, these "malvertisements" have been popping up everywhere, wrote Sandi Hardmeier, a Microsoft Most Valued Professional and security blogger.

On Sunday, Hardmeier wrote that she observed a fake FedEx banner ad that causes a user to be redirected to a Web site selling dodgy security software.

On Tuesday, security vendor WebSense blogged about a malicious banner ad on the Web site of USA Today, a national U.S. newspaper. WebSense wrote that if a user simply viewed the malicious ad, the person's browser window is immediately minimized, and a warning appears saying the computer is infected with malware, according to a description of the attack. Even if the user hits "cancel," the browser is redirected to another Web site selling spyware, which tries to download code to the PC.

In January, Adobe and other software vendors fixed some of their Flash development tools to stop hackers from creating malicious Shockwave Flash (.swf) files that enabled cross-site scripting attacks. That style of attack makes a browser execute malicious code via security weaknesses in a Web site.

At least 10,000 buggy Web sites were still serving up buggy Flash files around mid-March, as developers worked to fix the problem.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.