Please disable Adobe Flash until further notice. A group of hackers have hacked into the program for it and leaked a vulnerability that lets a malicious program do whatever it wishes to your computer via flash. This is currently ranked as a critical rating by Adobe.
These can mean forcing different sites to appear with flash on it (Screamers or revolting videos) and possibly encrypting your entire HDD.
As of writing this post (July 8th, 2015), the CERT/CC is currently unaware of a practical solution to this problem.
Please, do not open any untrusted flash content. Try to avoid opening flash content in general. I am begging you to share this information. Make your own posts, tell your family and friends, or anyone you know who has a computer. This is for you and your computer’s safety.
please dont spread this ‘hacker’ bullshit around.. shit like this comes up every time yall become aware of something computer-related.
a bug in adobe flash’s code =/= HAXORS OUT TO GET U
nobody can encrypt your files through a flash player. no one can put up random flash players in places unless they got a hold of the source of the website itself. theres no ‘malicious program doing what it wants’ running around. please stop trying to make people paranoid for no reason.
Did you… did you read the articles? Adobe themselves have said that the vulnerability allows an attacker to run arbitrary code on the target system and potentially take control of it, and that at least one exploit has already been published. By “take control”, they literally mean “anything the currently-operating user could do, an attacker could also do”, which includes opening browser windows and encrypting/deleting files.
It’s true that nobody “hacked into the program”, but people did leak a legitimate critical vulnerability with at least one known attack vector. This isn’t Tumblr users shrieking about scary bears, this is CERT and Adobe saying “don’t run untrusted Flash files until you know you have the version that fixes this bug”.
(Yes, a new version that fixes the bug has been released. Go here to check your Flash player version: http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/.)