And Again About Fake Adobe Flash Player Virus

By David Balaban

For many years numerous computer users surfing through various sites on the Internet can see an alert that their version of Adobe Flash Player is outdated and needs to be updated urgently.

Attention! Be careful! A huge number of these alerts are fake. They do not lead to the Adobe company website. Instead of installing such an update on your computer or phone, you personally infect it with a virus.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

How to distinguish a real alert from a fake? It’s pretty simple. We will try to describe everything in detail, step by step.

What browser do you use? This fake alert of the need to update Flash Player can only appear in the browsers Opera, Firefox, IE, Safari. It cannot be seen if you use the Google Chrome browser, as well as similar Chromium based like Yandex, etc. In all Chromium-based browsers, Flash Player is a built-in plugin and is updated automatically by the browser itself.

If you see suggestions to update Flash Player in Chromium-based browsers – you should know that this is a 100% fake alert containing a virus. Do not click on any links, just close the page.

Is the page from which you are offered to download update is owned by Adobe, which is the developer of Flash Player? Carefully look at the address bar of your browser. The address of the correct Flash Player update page is get.adobe.com/flashplayer. If there are differences in at least one letter – it is fake. And again, we want to note that from the official site you can download updates only by accessing it with the browsers like Opera, IE, Firefox, Safari. In the Chrome browser, you will see a message that the update is not required.

Even if the website address in the browser address line is correct, this does not mean that the website is legitimate and official. You may already have a virus on your computer that replaces DNS. In this case, you will notice the correct address of the site in the browser address bar, but in fact, you will be redirected to a different server controlled by criminals and you will be offered to install one more virus.

Hackers hunt for Flash Player bugs all the time. Less than a month has passed since the detection and elimination of the previous vulnerability in Adobe Flash player, as another incident happened. Attackers have found a new exploit loophole and they are already using it infecting new users. The most vulnerabilities exist in computers based on Windows 10 where the latest Adobe Flash Player is installed. Older versions of Flash Player are vulnerable too.

Mind that all updates must be downloaded only from the Adobe site, because the versions offered on third-party resources may also contain malware.

The frequency of occurrence of vulnerabilities, the risk of attack and loss of important personal data should be an important argument to users in favor of abandoning Flash on OS X and other operating systems. Not without reason, Steve Jobs was against using this software. His strong words against the Flash player is still relevant today.

I have removed this nightmare software from my MacBook a long time ago, and when it is still needed, I launch Chrome, which has an integrated Flash plug-in.

The best way to secure your device is to monitor your actions and use only trusted websites.

If you have already fallen victim to this trojan, we recommend that you manually remove the fake Flash Player update virus. Unfortunately, deleting a virus does not remove all other rogue applications it downloaded. The best way to clean your device is to use reliable antivirus solutions.