The vulnerabilities triggered by how Macromedia's Flash Player crashed the Opera browser and also a code execution bug affecting Linux and Unix users were all addressed by the product's latest security patch.

The first problem relates to Flash Player and was made public earlier in November. Macromedia warned that the bug in Flash Player, could allow attackers to take over a system. Since the Flash Player is so popular and can be found on the vast majority of systems, this vulnerability could turn unstable a great many computers.

The release fixes a problem spotted by Secunia Research, which involves the shell script used to launch Opera in Linux and Unix environments. The vulnerable script processes shell commands enclosed in URLs passed to Opera via the command line.

eEye Security, the company that discovered this vulnerability said it had proved "reliable exploitation" using the bug in Microsoft's Internet Explorer, but other browsers were also said to be just as vulnerable to an attack. Opera's fix arrived this week with the release of Opera 8.51, which includes Flash Player version 7r61, solving the problem.