End-of-Support for Adobe Flash Player after 31 December 2020

Adobe had announced that Flash Player will no longer be supported after 31 December 2020, meaning the end of this life-long web content tool. Adobe has also stated that the Flash content will be blocked from running in Flash Player beginning from 12 January 2021, since no further updates or security patches will be issued afterwards to secure users’ systems ^[1].

Major web browser vendors as well as web development platforms including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla etc., have been starting to disable the Flash Player plug-in by default ^{[2] [3] [4] [5] [6]}. Moreover, most of the major web browsers are planned to stop loading Adobe Flash content in the cause of its EOL.

HKCERT recommends users to abandon and uninstall Adobe Flash Player from their computers and mobile devices, and update the web browsers to the latest versions as to disable the default use of Adobe Flash Player plug-in as soon as possible. For web developers, they can switch to open standards for rich content such as HTML5, WebAssembly and WebGL etc.

Reference Links:

[1] https://www.adobe.com/hk_en/products/flashplayer/end-of-life.html

[2] https://webkit.org/blog/7839/adobe-announces-flash-distribution-and-updates-to-end

[3] https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2017/07/25/Games-Migration-to-Open-Web-Standards

[4] https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/saying-goodbye-flash-chrome

[5] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/announcements/adobe-flash-end-of-support

[6] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-support-adobe-flash