Flash Vulnerabilities Affect Thousands of Sites

[malware]

Researchers from Google have documented serious vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash content which leave tens of thousands of websites susceptible to attacks that steal the personal details of visitors. The security bugs reside in Flash applets, the ubiquitous building blocks for movies and graphics that animate sites across the web. Also known as SWF files, they are vulnerable to attacks in which malicious strings are injected into the legitimate code through a technique known as cross-site scripting, or XSS. Currently there are no patches for the vulnerabilities, which are found in sites operated by financial institutions, government agencies and other organizations. "Lots of people are vulnerable, and right now there are no protections available other than to remove those SWFs and wait for the authoring tools and/or Flash player to be updated," says Alex Stamos, an author of the Hacking Exposed Web 2.0 book. "In the mean time, people will have to think: 'What kind of flash am I using on my site,' and manually test for vulnerabilities."

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[btarunr]

I feel Silverlight isn't getting the attention it deserves as an alternative with better capabilities. There should always be two competing forces in an industry. It would foster innovation....which inturn would make sure software with lesser vulnerabilities come out and companies would give it their everything to making the software.

 

[Firedomain]

im not 2 sure whether this is very much of a consumer concern......

but if it is, i'd recommend Flashblock for Firefox Users.

Works a treat.

 

[peach1971]

http://noscript.net/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722

 

[[I.R.A]_FBi]

I feel Silverlight isn't getting the attention it deserves as an alternative with better capabilities. There should always be two competing forces in an industry. It would foster innovation....which inturn would make sure software with lesser vulnerabilities come out and companies would give it their everything to making the software.

one standard is enough thank you.

 

[1c3d0g]

Any competent web developer shouldn't have to code in flash to pepper their website with crap. (X)HTML/CSS and/or JavaScript with png's/gif's are more than enough.