Heads up, Flash devs: Mozilla has updated its popular Firefox browser to temporarily block all versions of Flash by default due to multiple significant security flaws that Flash maker Adobe has publicly acknowledged and vowed to fix.
If you’ve ever made a game that relies on Flash in some capacity, you should know that this change will affect the way many people play your work. By adding Flash to the Firefox blocklist, all Firefox users will have to manually enable the Flash plugin when they want to use it.
This most recent round of Flash-bashing stems from the revelation that Adobe’s software has at least three significant, previously unknown vulnerabilities that infosec company Hacking Team (and presumably others) had relied on to inject malicious code onto users’ computers without their knowledge.
Hacking Team was itself hacked and its private documents were disseminated online this month, rendering its hacking techniques and known security loopholes (including the Flash vulnerabilities) public knowledge.
Adobe has been scrambling to patch these vulnerabilities in the wake of their discovery, and Mozilla representatives have vowed to remove Flash from the browser’s blocklist once it meets their security expectations.
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2015