Adobe Flash Player Popular With Cyber Criminals

Despite an automatic update function Adobe Flash Player continues to be very popular with cyber criminals, who last week patched vulnerability now use the browser plug-in for the spread of ransomware. Reported that the Japanese anti-virus company Trend Micro .

Although the patch is available and can be installed automatically by Flash Player, shows that particularly American, British and Canadian users who did not. In Belgium and Germany are perceived attacks via the vulnerability. It has become a trend in which after the appearance of a Flash Player update cyber criminals develop an exploit to attack users who have not installed the update.

"Many people are still running the previous version, meaning that a large number of users at risk," said analyst Peter Pi. The exploit that uses the vulnerability in Flash Player has been added to the Magnitude Exploitkit. Once unpatched users land on a malicious or hacked page or see an ad that points to this exploitkit, they may become infected with undetected malware.

In this case CryptoWall 3.0-ransomware is installed. These kinds of ransomware encrypts files on the computer and then asks for a certain amount to decrypt the files. Recently warned ( pdf ) also anti-virus company McAfee mean it had observed a sharp increase in the number of attacks in the first quarter of this year via Flash Player vulnerabilities. Adobe Flash Player users would now be using version 18.0.0.160, which through this page can be checked.