I’m guessing there’s a better than decent chance that you’ve already heard about this, but this is such a bad one I thought I would just make sure: The appropriately-named Hacking Team was hacked earlier this week, and in the 400 gigs of data stolen from them was a previously unknown 0-day Flash exploit. The exploit allows web sites to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable machines.
The Hacking Team makes a living selling tools that allow their clients, mainly governments and law enforcement, to surveil internet users and snoop on encrypted internet traffic. An important part of their service is collecting unknown exploits and keeping them a secret so they don’t get patched, and can continue to be exploited.
Flash gets updated a lot, often for security purposes. What usually happens is a security firm, or a hacker looking for a bounty, or Adobe itself will find a vulnerability, and the Flash team will quietly patch their software before the exploit becomes widely known. This time, the exploit is already out there, and is quickly making its way into malware tools.
So, I assume you’re already multi-tasking and disabling Flash in your browsers. (Here’s how to disable Flash in Chrome. And Safari. And Firefox. And IE.)
And now you should go patch Flash.
With a few honourable exceptions, flash is generally redundant. Should we just kill it?
Not much html5 can’t do …
Agreed. We need to stop talking about “patching Flash” and start talking about “uninstalling Flash.”
Even Adobe doesn’t have any skin in the game anymore.
fwiw, Adobe Connect requires Flash … we use it quite often for remote training and webinars. Adobe uses it too of course for their own public and NDA online webinars.
Your post is already out of date, this issue has already been fixed and automatically updated on everyone’s machines. nice try though.
Even if the bug in Flash is already fixed – disabling it is never a bad advice.
@pete shand — Notifications are automatically sent, but on some platforms they still require user intervention to actually install. (On OS X, in particular, it’s not a quick process.) Flash sends so many updates, many many people ignore the notifications not knowing they are often ignoring critical security updates.
I already uninstalled flash , they never parched because flash is free , so no profit for them