Last week’s breach of Italian security firm Hacking Team exposed documentation that detailed the firm’s use of previously unknown security weaknesses in Adobe’s pervasive Flash platform. Typically known as “zero-day” vulnerabilities, these types of holes are being exploited by cybercriminals from the moment they are discovered, and companies will scramble madly to patch the problems and distribute the fix to their customers. Apparently fed up with the ongoing security failures of the plugin and Adobe’s lackluster speed at fixing them, Mozilla has started blocking outdated Flash plugins from running in Firefox, and Facebook’s security czar has called for the troubled platform to be retired:
It is time for Adobe to announce the end-of-life date for Flash and to ask the browsers to set killbits on the same day.
— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) July 12, 2015
What this means for you:
If you are the owner of a website that uses Flash, you should review whether its use is optional or required, with the latter choice presenting numerous challenges, including alienating a large segment of your mobile browsers; both iOS and Android require special, third-part apps to run Flash that are typically not free. Adding this to Google’s latest ranking algorithm which disfavors sites that aren’t mobile friendly, and you could end up with a website that gets relegated to a dark corner of the internet.
As a website visitor, at minimum you should update your Flash plugin immediately, and only do so by getting the latest version from Adobe’s website. Do not follow links or popups that appear while visiting websites – 99% of the time they are not legitimate and will lead to a malware infection. If you’d prefer to stop using Flash altogether, you can follow these instructions to make Flash ask for permission every time it runs:
