Is latest security hole the death of flash?

Flash was once a mainstay of the online world, providing us with everything from animations, to games, to vibrating pop-up banners, but no more. With the advent of smartphones that dropped support for the oft-insecure platform, it's fallen by the wayside. It continues to be used in some corners of the web, but even that may begin to dwindle after two new security flaws with the Adobe backed system have lead to Firefox blocking its use and Facebook pushing for it to be killed off entirely.

Although Flash has been problematic in the past, the recent hacking of Italian based malware maker, Hacking Team, showed that it had been exploiting a flaw in Flash for several years and that it had never been fixed. Other problems with the software soon emerged, which has prompted the Mozilla Foundation to put a warning message over any Flash content. Users that wish to proceed will need to manually enable it.

Mozilla has stated that when the errors are patched out it may remove the warning, but Adobe has a lot of flaws to fix before that will happen, as the Guardian points out.

Perhaps this is why Alex Stamos, current head of security at Facebook urged Adobe to drop its support for the long running tool last month.

https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/620306643360706561

The problem he says, is that few sites have moved on from Flash because there has been no real impetus behind it. If Adobe were to set a date for no longer supporting it, people would be forced to adopt new standards like HTML5 instead.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Would you guys like to see Flash officially killed off? It would be a shame to lose communities and content with sites like Newgrounds, which have been producing high quality games and animations for over a decade in the long running format. 

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