Facebook security chief wants to get rid of Flash

Facebook's new chief security officer Alex Stamos is on a quest to get rid of Adobe's Flash plug-in. Flash was invented roughly 20 years ago and ended up at Adobe after the company's acquisition of Macromedia in 2005. The big problem with Flash of course is that it seems to be an endless source of vulnerabilities and its high userbase makes it a prime target for attackers.

Stamos is urging Adobe to set an end-of-life date for Flash and to let browser makers rollout killbits on the same day so the whole ecosystem can be put to rest. This shouldn't happen overnight but an EOL date 18 months from now sounds like a good idea:

"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," he said in one tweet. He followed up in another tweet, adding: "Even if 18 months from now, one set date is the only way to disentangle the dependencies and upgrade the whole ecosystem at once."

...

There are a number of alternatives to Flash, like HTML5, which many are adopting. But it's clear by looking at the threat landscape that the harm caused by some Flash exploits significantly outweighs the platform's benefits, and have done for some time.