Facebook Security Chief Says It’s Time to Kill Flash

Abode revealed three critical vulnerabilities in the last week. The zero-day exploit, made public by the dump of Hacking Team’s data and email, was the most publicized but the company also disclosed another two issues that compromises the security of its users.

This comes on the heels of many more security issues that involve the browser plug-in. Steve Jobs famously penned his reason as to why iOS devices would not support Flash because of its affect on battery life and, most of all security. At the time he was seen as outlier — app developers publicly questioned Jobs and competing operating system made compatibility with Flash a selling point.

Since then, Flash support’s been dropped by all major mobile operating system for the reasons Jobs outlined. Increasing concerns about security, especially in light of the Hacking Team exploit, has lead to many uninstalling it on all their computing devices, including laptops and desktops.

Facebook security honcho Alex Stamos is advocating that Adobe kill it entirely.

“It is time for Adobe to announce the end-of-life date for Flash and to ask the browsers to set killbits on the same day,” Stamos, who formerly headed the security at Yahoo, Tweeted.

Graham Cluley, security analyst for HotForSecurity.com was blunt in his assessment of Flash’s future: “As it is, the only people who truly seem to love Adobe Flash these days are the criminals themselves.”

Via Hot for Security. Photo by Dave Maas/flickr.