Adobe released an update for Flash Player on Tuesday, but it does not include any security fixes. If no patches are released by the end of the month, it will be the first time since July 2012.
Adobe typically releases security updates for its products on the second Tuesday of every month, also known as “Patch Tuesday.” In some months, patches were released a few days sooner – particularly when zero-day vulnerabilities had been discovered – or a few days later.
Adobe says it does not have any security updates this month, but it has still advised users to update Flash Player to the latest version.
Only a total of four vulnerabilities were patched in Flash Player in August and September. The number of flaws discovered by researchers has decreased dramatically in the past period, particularly after Adobe announced its intention to kill the application by 2020.
Nevertheless, Flash Player exploits could still be valuable to malicious actors and we cannot rule out the possibility that a zero-day will be uncovered by the end of the month and the company will be forced to release a patch after all. The last Flash Player zero-day was addressed in December 2016.
Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla have recently outlined their plans for moving away from Flash Player. Mozilla announced in August that it had disabled the Flash plugin by default with the release of Firefox 55.
Since March 2008, when Adobe started announcing security updates on its Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) blog, the only months when no vulnerability fixes were announced were May 2008, September 2008, January 2009, March 2010, July 2010, January 2011, July 2011 and July 2012.
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Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.
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