Adobe patches Flash player flaws revealed in the cyber-attack on the Hacking Team

Adobe has patched the two zero-day vulnerabilities that were exploited in the hack of Hacking Team’s website which provides surveillance programs to various governments around the world. The hack that shook the company involved the theft of around 400 GB worth of internal data which was later posted on torrent sites for everybody to see. The company has indicated that there was someone big behind the hack and investigation is ongoing. The two security vulnerabilities became glaringly obvious after the incident.

Cyber-attacks have been common for some time now but the hackers are getting more and more dangerous with their actions, attacking a lot of computers at the same time. The hackers make use of the zero day vulnerabilities to access the systems of the other users. These zero day vulnerabilities are the holes in software that are unknown to the creator. Since these are undetectable even by the creators, guarding them against hackers becomes well nigh impossible.

In a brief security notice, Adobe revealed that it had patched the two flaws which would allow any hacker to gain control of your system. Although, it is up to the users whether to use flash now or not. Firefox has already removed Adobe plugin over security concern and if someone wants to use it now, they’ll have to manually update flash. However, hours later Adobe had released the patch fixing the two flaws. The Flash flaws can be used to a great extent since almost all the computers and laptops use Windows, Mac or Linux operating system and the flaw affects all three of them. The company came to know about the flaws through the data of Hacking Team that was posted online.

There have been lots of suggestions to shut down Flash since it is full of technical problems. Even today, Adobe is not really keen on continuing Flash. Flash was important in the early days of the web and now that it has served its purpose  and other web standards like HTML 5 allows the developers to replicate most of the functions of Flash, it might be the right time to say goodbye. Apple and Google’s YouTube have already gotten rid of Flash. The Facebook’s chief of security, Alex Stamos, also thinks that Flash should be discontinued and should pave the way for something new. The Internet community needs to be safe and clearly Adobe Flash is not likely to be of any help in that regard.