YNOT – Adobe released a critical patch this week to address four flaws in its popular Flash software. All four holes could have been exploited by hackers to execute code remotely on vulnerable machines.
Though no longer in development for the mobile web, Flash remains the most widely deployed software on the internet. The product is particularly popular among adult webmasters for its video-streaming capabilities. Flash’s popularity makes it especially attractive to hackers who actively seek ways of distributing malware via “drive-by” attacks — downloads that occur without user interaction, usually facilitated by rogue code on servers whose administrators are unaware they’ve been compromised.
The update patches Windows, Mac, Linux and Android operating systems. Apple devices do not employ Flash. The late Steve Jobs famously refused to include compatibility for the product in the Apple ecosystem, repeatedly claiming the software represented much too great a security risk. The company has stuck with Jobs’ assessment.
The four crucial fixes in the March Flash update include patches for an integer overflow, a buffer overflow, a use-after-free flaw and a memory corruption flaw.
