ID: IRCNE2011051114
Date: 2011-05-14
According to “Computerworld”, Adobe has released an important update for its Flash Player software that fixes critical security flaws and gives users a better way of controlling whether they are being tracked on the Web.
The Flash Player 10.3 update, released Thursday, lets users manage Flash cookies using their browser's privacy settings or through a new control panel. Flash cookies, also called "Local Stored Objects," have been a sore spot for Adobe users since 2009, when researchers showed they were being used extensively to track Web surfers. The problem is that Flash cookies, unlike traditional cookies, historically have been hard to remove, and some sites have used them to track users who have wanted to block cookies.
The new Flash cookie management option works with the Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers. In the future, it will also be available to Chrome and Safari users. Web surfers can also manage their Flash cookies through a new control panel, designed to give users a single place where they can make sure that Flash Player isn't doing anything it shouldn't. "With Flash Player 10.3, we have created a new native control panel for Windows, Macintosh and Linux desktops that will allow end-users to manage all of the Flash Player settings, including camera, microphone and Local Shared Objects," Adobe spokesman wrote in a blog post.
The new Flash Player also includes a number of security fixes for several critical bugs. The security updates, which affect all Flash platforms, are important. Flash has been used in a lot of online attacks over the past few years, and with this latest set of patches, Adobe said it has fixed a previously unknown flaw that had been leveraged in online attacks.
"There are reports of malware attempting to exploit one of the vulnerabilities, in the wild via a Flash file embedded in a Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel file delivered as an email attachment targeting the Windows platform," Adobe said in a note posted to its website. "However, to date, Adobe has not obtained a sample that successfully completes an attack."
Also Mac OS users will now get automatic software update notifications, just like their Windows counterparts.
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