Alex Stamos is the new chief security officer at Facebook and recently he declared that
It is time for Adobe to announce the end-of-life date for Flash and to ask the browsers to set killbits on the same day.
Even if 18 months from now, one set date is the only way to disentangle the dependencies and upgrade the whole ecosystem at once.
— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) July 12, 2015
Last week were stolen 400gb of data from the spyware company called Hacking Team. This happened because there was a major Flash vulnerability that allowed hackers to execute malicious code on a target’s machine via a website. In a short time, Adobe released a patch to fix this problem, but, according to TechCrunch’s article: “Hacking Team Hacked“,
A further list, posted to Pastebin, claims to show the organization’s client list, which includes government agencies from Australia, Egypt, Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore, Spain, Thailand, Turkey and UAE. The Verge reported in 2013 that Hacking Team made a major push to lure U.S.-based clients, and according to this list, the FBI and Drug Enforcement Agency had engaged Hacking Team’s services at one point.
What should replace Flash? What is the best alternative?
According to Alex Stamos, HTML5 is the best alternative. And he suggest everyone to implement it as soon as possible.
@aloria Right. Nobody takes the time to rewrite their tools and upgrade to HTML5 because they expect Flash4Eva. Need a date to drive it.
— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) July 12, 2015
@hanno They get to sell modern versions of their tools that create HTML5!
— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) July 12, 2015
@ncardozo It is not required with modern browsers. I'm watching a BJJ video posted by @Beaker right now using HTML5.
— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) July 12, 2015
In case you don’t knwow, starting from January 2015, Youtube is using HTML5 video player, so the video HTML tag is getting more and more attention. More info on Youtube using HTML5 video player.
