Zero Day readers, why aren't you patching Flash Player?

Adobe's plan to rush out a fix for the latest Flash Player zero-day vulnerability got me thinking about patch adoption rates among ZDNet Zero Day readers.

According to our statistics counter, the majority of you (security-savvy readers?) are very tardy in applying Flash Player updates.

Here are the numbers for Flash Player installations from all visitors to this blog in October 2010.  Only 65% of you are running a fully updated version of Flash Player (10.1.85.3).

Every version of Flash Player marked as "Outdated" is vulnerable to remote code execution vulnerabilities that can be exploited via the Web to launch drive-by malware downloads (no extra click required).

Like I said, the readers of this blog are mostly security/computer savvy and on top of security issues.  If these readers are so tardy in applying patches for such a commonly targeted application, it's safe to assume the average mom-and-pop users are even further behind.

There really is no excuse to be running an outdated version of Flash.  You can use this link to check your Flash version.   If you're running Mozilla Firefox (33% of you), use the Plugin Check utility.

Here's a look at Zero Day readers that support Java, another huge target for malware attacks:

Frightening.