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About 10 years to late, after tomorrow you will no longer see the seemingly weekly patches to Adobe Flash. This is because tomorrow is the end of life for Flash – probably a decade too late.
Adobe bought Flash and the company that made it, Macromedia, in 2005 for over $3 billion and it has been a disaster ever since. It seems like no matter how often they patched it – and some times it was daily – there were more security holes.
IT IS IMPORTANT TO UNDERSTAND THAT JUST BECAUSE ADOBE IS NO LONGER SENDING OUT DAILY (JUST KIDDING) PATCHES DOES NOT MEAN IT WILL NOT HAVE DAILY VULNERABILITIES. IT JUST MEANS THAT THE BAD GUYS WILL BE ABLE TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THOSE HOLES SINCE THEY WILL NOT GET FIXED.
Starting today, when the Flash ‘check for updates’ cycle runs, your users will see this message on their screen if they have Flash installed.
If you have been proactive and have deleted Flash already, hopefully the Flash updater is removed as well and your users won’t see this.
Also assume that browsers like IE and Edge that have bundled a version of Flash with the browser will be sending out browser updates to remove that code.
Assuming that users do not understand why they are getting this message, they will be calling your support staff.
Even if users do understand it, they should not have permissions to uninstall it, so the uninstall will fail if they try.
If you have been procrastinating about dealing with this, now is the time to take it off the backlog.
ONE MORE WARNING. THERE ARE LIKELY THOUSANDS OF WEB SITES (OR MORE) THAT STILL USE FLASH. MANY OF THOSE ARE GOVERNMENT WEB SITES BECAUSE GOVERNMENT ENTITIES UNDERSTAND CYBERSECURITY AND ARE ON TOP OF THINGS (NOT!). THAT MEANS THESE WEB SITES WILL NOT WORK PROPERLY AFTER YOU REMOVE FLASH. IF YOU FALL INTO THIS CATEGORY, YOU MIGHT WANT TO CREATE A SINGLE WORKSTATION THAT IS SUPER LOCKED DOWN OR A VM THAT USERS CAN CONNECT TO USE THESE SITES. NOT SIMPLE, BUT NEITHER IS GETTING HACKED OR HIT BY RANSOMWARE.