Adobe web browser plugins fail safety test again

Adobe Acrobat Reader and the beloved and hated (depending on who you talk to) Flash plugins are once again to blame for a deluge in malware infections and some serious computer crime.

Gumblar Trojan, yet another un-killable Microsoft Windows malware that keeps getting resurrected is once again hacking PCs.

Gumbar exploits flaws in the commonly installed plugins to control user's PCs. PC users and vendors are slow to wake up to the risk this poses. Even Microsoft installed them in the PCs it sells under its "Microsoft signature" brand in its new retail and online stores. The term "Microsoft signature" might begin to take on an ominious double meaning.

Is there any new softwar Windows users can get to protect them from these browser exploits?

Probably not.

The solution is obvious and far less painful to them than the legion of advertisers, hackers, and web developers that are one way or another trying to take advantage of them and their PC.

Instead of continually adding software to their web browser, they need to control, disable, or remove it.

Adobe Acrobat actually works much, much better if you install the Reader without instealling the plugin. The plugin makes the content load in the web browser. That is bad. It makes the browser hang, pause, and freeze at various times. Sometimes the browser hangs and one has to crash out of it. So remove that plugin and never install it again.

Flash is a beloved tool of hackers and in your face advertisers. Those popups that your Block Popups browser feature does not work on it. Get rid of the Flash plugin and you will not get those stupid popup ads anymore.

The best way to get rid of Flash is probably to simply disable it in your browser. Not sure if IE allows this but Firefox certainly does. Spend more qualiity browsing time with Firefox if you want to be happy.

Now, some people find that there might be some web site they actually want to view Flash content on. For instance, YouTube has most though certainly not all content in Flash format. Enabling Flash for only YouTube is not only possible, it is easy, if you do not mind downloading a Firefox extenion.

Download Noscript and install it. Firefox lets you do this directly from inside the browser.

After installing it, agree that yes, you want the browser to restart if it asks.

When you visit sites, if Flash content yyou do want to show up does not, give Noscript permission to show it - if you are sure about the integrity of the file, the person who uploaded it on the server (or placed it as an ad), the web server(s) where it is hosted, and so on.

It is a serious list of questions to run through every time you grant a new site to have permission to show dynamic conent. Ten years ago, you could afford to be generous. Today, you must be miserly and make such permission a rare treat to sites.

Recently, even supposedly tech savvy sites like Microsoft advertising (hosted on an MSN site) and the Gawker/Gizmodo blogs were infected with malware. Not directly, but through ads the accepted. This has been an obvious risk for ages and has been exploited starting at least several years ago.

Since Windows is often the target, its users, vendors, and advertisers should be careful but they are obviously not careful enough. That is where you can help yourself by choosing a better web browser than IE and taking control by disabling or restricting Flash and other dangerous plugins.

If enough people choke or throttle back Flash, Adobe will get the message, improve their staffing and tasking on the Flash project, and turn it around. If everyone stops using it, then Flash will die off because no one will bother to create content in it.

Hopefully, Adobe will respond in time before that happens. Until then, there is no question that Flash is massively over used on the web, and harms performance and security. The problems it has had are reocurrent and hackers and rogue advertisers really like it. Flash does not really fit the web being kind of a rogue thing all on its own.

If you have a Macintosh and run Safari, you might be interested in the ClickToFlash WebKit (Safari web engine) plugin. In some ways it is even nicer than Noscript and it focuses specifically on Flash. Using it, you can sometimes view content in H.264 format which has some excellent advantages in terms of enjoyability.


Another handy tool is Adblock Plus. Firefox will assist you in finding this.

Tools > Get addons
select Adblock Plus

As before, you install the plugin and then confirm the browser request to Restart if it asks.

Adblock reduces annoyances from obtrusive ads and instrusive privacy violations. It targets certain offenders using a blacklist technique. The list is updated from time to time. This seems to work pretty well.

Not everyone is using bad mechanisms and tricks to do marketing on the web. Someday, hopefully, there will not be a need for Adblock Plus. That day is not upon us yet, however.