Adobe will finally kill Flash in 2020

Denunciations like "most frequently exploited product" have been common for the software.

Adobe Flash has been beaten, battered and bruised countless times over recent years. Now it’s finally going to die.

The software will meet its demise by the end of 2020, Adobe said, closing a two-decade long chapter on one of the most popular and controversial pieces of technology in the history of the internet.

“We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats,” Adobe announced in a blog post on Tuesday.

It’s tough to overstate the security impact Flash has had in the last two decades. The software has drawn denunciations — including “most frequently exploited product” — so many times that detractors as famous as Steve Jobs have called for its death for more than a decade. Adobe and a slate of tech giants now agree that the story needs and ending: Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla will end support for the technology in concert with its owner, a decision that comes after all the major browsers including Chrome, Edge and Safari blocked Flash by default in the past year.

“For 20 years, Flash has helped shape the way that you play games, watch videos and run applications on the web,” Google Chrome product manager Anthony Laforge wrote in a blog post announcing Flash’s end of life. “But over the last few years, Flash has become less common. Three years ago, 80 percent of desktop Chrome users visited a site with Flash each day. Today usage is only 17 percent and continues to decline.”

Users have been advised for years to block and uninstall the tech to protect themselves from the growing pile of exploits that target Flash. Content producers should long ago have begun the migration away from Flash but many — including the U.S. Congress — still use Flash to stream video despite repeated warnings.

For security professionals, it’s going to be a crawling three-year countdown until the end.

Government

• FBI officials say AI is bolstering adversaries, emphasizing need to focus on cyber basics, patching

• Feds accuse China of ‘systematic’ distillation of U.S. AI models

• CIA’s Michael Ellis says cyber intelligence is changing how the agency operates

• The G7 tells industry to hurry up and prep for post-quantum encryption

Technology

• European parliament members call for slowdown of Serbia’s EU entry over spyware use

• FCC proposes public scorecard to rate telecoms on anti-robocall efforts

• Pegasus, NoviSpy variant spyware found on devices of Serbian activists

• Wyden seeks upgraded NSA security guidance on commercial VPN use

Threats

• Microsoft discloses two actively exploited zero-days among 974 vulnerabilities

• Russian national extradited to US for alleged involvement in bank-account takeover scheme

• Attackers exploit zero-days in consistently besieged SonicWall product

• Jail time for Maine child in 764 marks turning point in federal law enforcement

Policy

• Whistleblower says USPS deploying new, ‘untested’ IT systems governing mail-in ballots

• ‘Watershed 250’ test program in Texas looks to private sector for water cybersecurity help

• Former sexual abuse victims say Grok used their images, videos to train deepfake capabilities

• Cyber threats nudge Trump to sign executive order on foreign equipment in U.S. energy infrastructure