It seems that everyday we learn that new flaws are being uncovered in many of the popular tools we use in everyday life. The Adobe Flash plugin has never been immune from this disturbing trend and if the reports on the Trend Micro blog are anything to go by, we are facing yet another zero day exploit, identified as CVE-2015-0313 that will leave our PCs susceptible to hijackers. The exploit was apparently detected when users to the popular video streaming site Daily Motion were redirected to a website where the exploit was hosted.
The trouble with this exploit is that the infection is instantaneous and is not limited to just the Daily Motion website alone. This is because the infection is not triggered from the website, but rather from the ad platform. Although Flash is increasingly becoming redundant, there are still many of us who still use it. If you are one such user, here’s what you need to do to disable Flash and stay protected.
How to Disable Flash in Google Chrome
1. Open Chrome and in the Address bar, type about:plugins and press Enter.
2. Scroll down to Adobe Flash Player and click Disable.
How to Disable Flash in Internet Explorer
1. Open Internet Explorer and click the gear icon at the top right corner of the screen.
2. From the drop-down menu, select Manage add-ons.
3. In the Manage add-ons dialog box, from the Show drop-down list, select All add-ons.
4. Select Shockwave Flash Object and in the bottom right corner, click Disable.
How to Disable Flash on Firefox
1. Open the Firefox browser and click the menu icon (the three horizontal lines) at the top right corner of the screen.
2. Click Add-ons.
3. In the new window that opens up, click Plugins.
4. Look out for any Shockwave or Flash-related plugins. From the respective drop-down menus, select Never Activate.
Adobe has issued a security bulletin promising to release a Flash update during the second week of February. Until then it is wise to simply disable Flash. Better yet, you can completely do away with Flash as the internet is steadily moving away from Flash and into HTML5.
If you simply cannot do without Flash, at least enable click-to-play option so that you only play content when you click on it. This avoids all Flash content from getting loaded when you visit a site.
In Chrome you can go to Settings-> Show advanced settings->Content settings. Under Privacy, scroll down to Plug-ins, and select Click to play.
In Firefox, you can simply use an extension like Flashblock extension to solve the problem.
As far as IE goes, head to Settings->Manage add-ons. On the Toolbars and Extensions screen, click the Show drop-down and select All add-ons. Right-click Shockwave Flash Object and select More information. Click Remove all sites.
That’s it folks! Make sure you disable Flash on all your web browsers and stay safe!
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