may be old hat on here, but flash criticals again

[deadlyhabit]

Adobe released an update for the Adobe Flash Player earlier this week to rectify a zero-day exploit being employed as part of the long-running cyber-espionage campaign known as "Pawn Storm." Unfortunately, as determined by Trend Micro and confirmed by Adobe in a follow-up security bulletin, that update failed to correct the problem, and so another update has been released today.

The new update addresses "critical" vulnerabilities in the Flash Player, which "if exploited would allow malicious native-code to execute, potentially without a user being aware," according to Adobe's severity ratings. This could result in PCs being crashed or even taken over by remote attackers.

The good news, such as it is, is that the exploit is being used in "limited, targeted attacks," according to the security bulletin. Trend Micro said essentially the same thing on its blog, noting that Pawn Storm attacks appear to be contained to international government agencies, specifically against "several foreign affairs ministries from around the globe."

Even so, this is pretty clearly another nail in Flash's coffin. It's on the way out anyway, and security holes like this are sooner or later bound to become less about making sure that Flash is up to date, and more about wondering why you're bothering with it in the first place.

There's plenty to read about it if cyber-security is your thing. If, on the other hand, you just want to ensure that your PC doesn't get dicked around by some jerk on the other side of the planet, you can simply grab the latest update and carry on with your day. Either way, it's something you'll want to get on with as soon as possible.

Thanks, Ars Technica.

http://www.pcgamer.com/adobe-flash-player-updated-to-combat-critical-security-vulnerability/

hell i think i posted something similar here

[cooper]

Flash is basically rsh and you wouldn't want to run that these days either.

Nuke the install from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

[hairbag]

bash flash daily and you should be sorta safe

#!/bin/sh
apt-get update
apt-get remove flashplugin-nonfree -y
apt-get install flashplugin-nonfree -y && update-flashplugin-nonfree --install

Edited October 20, 2015 by hairbag

[cooper]

Start by figuring out why you need flash in the first place. HTML5 is supported in lots of places that currently claim to only work with Flash.

Now that you have identified these places, think about why what they're doing can only be achieved with flash, and inform them of the better alternative (and everything other than flash is a better alternative).

Look around for alternatives to these places for yourself. They may change the error of their ways, but if/while they don't do you want to bend over the table with your pants on your ankles and ask them to use a bit of lube this time? Find other places that give you what it is you want in a way that doesn't expose you to code written by people who I wouldn't trust with making a secure 'Hello world' anymore. It's the internet! Stupid people who've put their private shit online complain all the time that they can't get it off anymore (hi Snubs!) because someone somewhere found a copy and decides to share it for posterity. Google "Jason Alexander" for a very entertaining example of one of those.

[cooper]

To close off the year Adobe published a few more flash issues.

For shits and giggles I ran a query at the NVD to see how many High (7-10) security issues were found in Adobe Flash Player in the last year.

The result.

They're up to 298. Let that sink in for a moment. Imagine working on a product for a year and having to fix, on average, a little over over 1 unique, high-critical bug in that product every single working day of the year. Would you want to be doing that work? Do you trust the work these people are doing? Sure, you can't, with certainty, blame the current workforce, but that steaming pile originated somehow. Really people, if you're running Flash, whatever you're doing you're doing it wrong.

Edited December 29, 2015 by cooper