It is time to uninstall Flash.
The notoriously insecure multimedia plugin is causing more issues than it is worth. Of late there have been numerous major security issues posted online, in yet more ways attackers can come in and touch your junk. Some of my SEO friends especially one that lives near Honolulu, Hawaii is done with Adobe Flash and all it’s problems.
Not long after releasing a plethora of bandaid patches for Adobe software products (including Flash), Adobe have confirmed another major security vulnerability and it is a doozie: it affects all versions of Flash; Windows, Mac and Linux.
seriously…
In a security bulletin they posted to their site they said:
A critical vulnerability (CVE-2015-7645) has been identified in Adobe Flash Player 19.0.0.207 and earlier versions for Windows, Macintosh and Linux.
Successful exploitation could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.
And then they continued on to say that it “hopes” to make an update available sometime next week. So a major vulnerability that spans across multiple platforms is discovered and you only hope to have a patch for it released sometime next week? Shit.
It’s like a car company discovering a fault with the braking system in all of their cars and it saying, “We hope to have the faulty brakes repaired soon, maybe sometime next week.”
Do we even need Flash anymore?
Maybe 8 years ago when HTML5 and browser API’s were lacking, we needed it. But do we need Flash in 2015? It just keeps on breaking our hearts with its security issues, who on Earth is working on Flash? Do they just have a bunch of high schoolers working on it?
All of the sites that matter like Hulu or Youtube have HTML5 versions of their video player, there is really no reason to use it unless you’re running some kind of proprietary app that is built in Flash.
Yes, Flash used to serve a need, but now we don’t need it. We can animate and work with media in HTML and Javascript, without flattening the batteries of website visitors on smartphones or laptops.
You have to ask yourself is keeping Flash installed worth the pain? If one or two sites stop working because of it, is there any love lost? There is no reason for any site or application to be dependent on Flash in 2015.
It seems the only people using Flash are websites with proprietary DRM implementations not supported in non-Flash and those annoying autoplaying advertisements you see a lot of news websites.
