A major vulnerability has just been found in Adobe Flash. Now we know that this won't surprise too many people as there have been a number of these before and it is yet another issue for this video plugin software to add to their collection. This particular one however leaves PCs susceptible to hijacking. If you want to protect yourself from this, we recommend that you disable flash immediately in whatever browser you are using. We have the information below to help you do just that.

Over the past 10 years, we have seen Adobe's Flash Player come under a lot of scrutiny. It is resource-hungry, buggy and sluggish and it seems to be throwing up vulnerabilities all the time. The latest, CVE-2015-0313, has left Adobe with its third exploit to patch in just two weeks. There are large numbers of people in the tech community shunning Flash altogether and below we will show you how to disable this add-on once and for all.

Firefox

The first thing you need to do is open your firefox browser. Next hit the Settings icon which is the three horizontal lines in the top right hand corner. Click Addons, and then Plugins. Next to any Shockwave or Flash-related objects, you'll see a drop down menu. Click on it and set it to “never activate”.

Chrome

The first thing you need to do is open up your Chrome browser. Then in the URL bar type “about:plugins”. Go down to Adobe Flash Player and select “Disable”.

Internet Explorer

Open your IE browser and hit the Settings icon which is the gear-like image at the top right hand corner. Select “manage add-ons” from the drop down menu. Under the “show” drop-down, select “all add-ons”. Finally, select Shockwave Flash Object, and in the bottom right hand corner, select “disable”.

Opera

Open up Opera. In the URL bar, type “about:plugins”. Scroll down till you find Adobe Flash Player and select “disable”.

Safari

Open Safari and then click on Safari in the Menu Bar. From here click on Preferences. Next click on “Security” and then click on the “website Settings...” button next to “allow plugins”. Select Adobe Flash Player from the left hand side menu and then select “block” in the “when visiting other websites” drop-down menu.

That will disable the Flash Player add-on in your browser as there is no fix as yet for this latest vulnerability. There is no harm is disabling Flash and leaving it this way as you no longer need it for browsing as most websites have moved over to HTML5 including YouTube who made the move late last month.