In its Security Update 2010-001, released on Tuesday, Apple has fixed as many as 12 vulnerabilities in its Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard – with the fixes dealing, as usual, with issues within the core system, and not including the addition of new features to built-in applications or fixing of application bugs.

The collection of the most recent updates, the first ones from Apple this year, include patches for seven flaws in Adobe Flash Player and one in the protocol used for securing Internet traffic.

Since Apple packages its Mac OS X with Abode Flash Player, it regularly releases updates for it, which this time round includes seven fixes that bring the program up to version 10.0.42.34 - the edition that Adobe shipped for Windows and Linux in December last year.

Among the other patches, the most notable one is the patch for vulnerability in the secure socket layer (SSL) and transport socket layer (TSL) protocols that, once exploited, enables attackers to capture or change ‘supposedly protected’ data when it is moved between browsers and servers.

With Apple refraining from assigning any severity ratings to the vulnerabilities, nine of the 12 bugs came along with the phrase “may lead to arbitrary code execution,” which implies that Apple considers the flaw to be critical enough to be used by attackers for hacking a Mac.