topic Re: Adobe Flash Player Virus/Worm in SmorgasBoard

Adobe Flash Player Virus/Worm

MattH — Sat, 02 May 2009 14:53:36 GMT

My wife asked me why on a web site that has embedded youtube videos instead of the expected product demonstrations she was seeing some VERY not-safe-for-work videos. She was mystified because her Antivirus was current and said her system was clean.

Well, skipping a bunch of technical details, it turns out the version of Abobe Flash Player installed on her computer had a hole. Some website somewhere had been hacked to send a Shockwave SWF file that exploited the hole and replaced her Flash player with a hacked version that modified youtube URLs, so when going to unrelated web sites it would look as though the unrelated web sites had been hacked.

EVERYBODY should go directly to www.adobe.com and reinstall a known-clean copy of Adobe Flash Player from there.

It also turned out she had been getting "you need to update your Flash Player, click here" messages for a while but she had been afraid to click OK because she was afraid that dialog box was a Trojan.

This stuff is getting to where even very careful and conscientious users like my wife can get caught through no fault of their own.

Re: Adobe Flash Player Virus/Worm

marty56 — Sat, 02 May 2009 17:39:54 GMT

From work I know that some of the older versions of the Flash player had some holes in them but this is the first I have heard of an actual example. I would recommend McAfee Site Advisor which protects against going to sites that have known expliots or ones that havent been tested yet. Its a great product and there is a free version as well.

Message Edited by marty56 on 05-02-2009 10:39 AM

Re: Adobe Flash Player Virus/Worm

haulingthescoreup — Sat, 02 May 2009 17:36:01 GMT

Just reloaded my Flash Player from the Adobe site, and reloaded Adobe Reader for good measure.

I seem to get assaulted by update messages, so this was very useful!