Adobe Flash lives on

Adobe Flash is a ‘universally installed software’ and now being called obnoxious and useless. Recently the software received another grave kick that ought to kill it. It has been discovered that Flash’s vulnerabilities have exposed some attack patterns that might be related to Russian government. Arguably the most useless and obnoxious piece of near universally installed software, Adobe Flash has received another kick that ought finally to send it to its grave. A cyber espionage operation whose attack patterns suggest ties to the Russian government has been discovered using one of Flash’s endlessly emerging vulnerabilities. The researchers call this operation ‘Pawn Storm’ which has been running since 2007. The operation targeted U.S., Ukrainian governments, media, military and North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It makes use of malicious app for extracting data from iPhones. It also uses “spear – phishing” technique for obtaining information from computers by sending links that have been purported and direct people to malicious websites.

The issue was taken more seriously when the attack caused an embarrassing breach to the famous security firm – Hacking Team. The hackers released the firm’s documents describing the big security hole in Adobe Flash. Following this, Mozilla Firefox disabled the Flash plug – in and chief security officer of facebook, Alex Stamos asked Adobe to end the product. But Flash lives on.

As per the reports, almost 99 percent of the internet-enabled systems (excluding tablets and smartphones) have Flash player installed which means these are at high risk. Research suggests that Flash player has much vulnerability which can be exploited by hackers in many ways. Flash once used to be the standard for videos, games and animation. Steve Jobs, Apple founder said back in 2010 that it eats on resources and battery and that HTML5 are better alternatives.
Most of the ads are powered by Flash. According to a study, earlier this year 90 percent of the ads that were displayed were Flash based. Most of the Ad makers still use Adobe Flash since they are used to it. Advertisers who are still using the old technology run Flash Ads. However, these ads appear as static ones on smartphones since Flash is disabled to prevent battery from draining out.

Though the technology is dying out, still 20 percent of websites make use of it. The revenue that Adobe generates by selling Flash tools is very little when compared to the money it makes from the sale of its other core products.