Adobe has been receiving a lot of pressure lately to kill off Flash once and for all, but it looks like the company is not really ready to give up on its famous plugin. Consequently, the head of security over at Facebook publicly encouraged Adobe to make the call, and just a day later, Mozilla’s Mark Schmidt announced that Firefox would now block Flash automatically thanks to a recent update. The announcement was made via Twitter, and it was later followed by another Tweet that marked the block as temporary.
BIG NEWS!! All versions of Flash are blocked by default in Firefox as of now. https://t.co/4SjVoqKPrR #tech #infosec pic.twitter.com/VRws3L0CBW
— Mark Schmidt 🌐 (@MarkSchmidty) July 14, 2015
To be clear, Flash is only blocked until Adobe releases a version which isn't being actively exploited by publicly known vulnerabilities.
— Mark Schmidt 🌐 (@MarkSchmidty) July 14, 2015
Flash used to be quite important back in the day, especially when it came to video playback. However, with Youtube moving to HTML 5 at the start of 2015, the plugin is becoming more and more obsolete and dangerous even. Hackers often use Flash to gain a foothold into users’ PC’s, and while Adobe states that it is doing its best to improve its security, we’ve not seen any impressive results so far. There’s even an entire movement called Occupy Flash that aims to remove the vulnerable plugin from the internet altogether.
As for Firefox users, they can always re-enable Flash should the need arise, but I don’t really see why they would want to.
Thank you Engadget for providing us with this information.
