So Adobe just released a new update for Flash Player, and also seems to have started pushing scareware…
Flash is a very good attack vector for most bad guys to attack us through, first of all it is one of the most common pieces of third party software and I am forever seeing that most every day computer users seem to not keep their software up to date. This means that security vulnerabilities which are well known – and have been for months – have not been patched on said users’ machine; and can potentially end up leading to huge problems.
The latest critical update for Adobe Flash Player solved this problem by introducing an automatic update facility – hoorah! However, Adobe also started pushing scareware on it’s manual update page – bad times 🙁
You can read more on this here where the following points are highlighted:
- The “free PC health check” identifies a huge number of issues with your system – even on a clean install of Windows 7
- The system does highlight some security vulnerabilities – however it did not identify that certain software was not up to date (as I said earlier a huge security vulnerability)
- The software also identifies registry errors – the author states that “…..[registry cleaners] they should never be allowed in the hands of anyone but an expert PC diagnostician” and I must say I am inclined to agree with him
- Once these so called errors have been identified – you need to pay for them to be fixed!
The scareware pushed out is produced by Iolo Technologies – some reviews of their products can be found here and here.
The author of the article linked to above does state the Iolo Technologies is a legitimate company, and does not install any Adware or malicious software, however as you can see from the reviews the software is hardly mind-blowing – and this is possibly their only crime, bad software.
In conclusion do the security update for Flash Player, but don’t waste your time with the free check up!. If you already did – don’t worry this software doesn’t appear to be malicious – just not very good!