Love it or hate it, but Adobe’s Flash is used on countless websites scattered across the internet.
The technology has been with many users for a rather long time, but the first signs of trouble came in 2010 when Apple CEO Steve Jobs said he won’t allow the tech on Apple devices.
Flash, although extremely useful and relatively easy to code in, is hugely susceptible to hacking attempts and exploitation bugs. Adobe has been somewhat quick to patch them, but Facebook’s new chief security officer, Alex Stamos, wants to set a date for Flash’s funeral.
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
Even if 18 months from now, one set date is the only way to disentangle the dependencies and upgrade the whole ecosystem at once.
— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) July 12, 2015
Hacking Team, whose own website and internal servers were hacked last week, called one of the flaws in Flash as “the most beautiful Flash bug for the last four years”.
In July last year Google announced that it would be including a message to searchers when its algorithms detect that the website is not supported (uses Flash) by the device that they are searching from.
That same month, Adobe has issued a warning of a vulnerability has been discovered that could allow attacks to take control of a PC. The exploit was discovered by Google Engineer Michele Spagnuolo by using his exploit tool called Rosetta Flash.
