latest adobe flash player update for mac

#Latest adobe flash player update for mac update
#Latest adobe flash player update for mac software

But what they have done is make the disguise even more convincing by somehow duping Apple into approving their code as legitimate.Īccording to Wardle, once he notified Apple about the problem it was quick to revoke the certificates of the offending app – and thus remove the notarization status.

#Latest adobe flash player update for mac update

When I first wrote about Shlayer in January 2019, it was posing successfully as a Flash Player update and it seems that the criminals behind the attacks haven’t felt any need to change that.

Again, due to their notarization status, users will (quite likely), fully trust these malicious samples.Īnd you know what’s worse? The malicious content contained within this fake Adobe Flash Player update is not some brand new breed of malware, but instead a version of Shlayer – a worryingly-common infection which has dominated the Mac malware charts since 2019.Now notarized, these malicious payloads are allowed to run …even on macOS Big Sur.Apple scanned and apparently detecting no malice, (inadvertently) notarized them.These malicious payloads were submitted to Apple, prior to distribution.Adobe will be removing Flash Player download pages from its site and Flash-based content will be blocked from running in Adobe Flash Player after December 31, 2020. However, in this case, the malicious code had actually received Apple’s stamp of approval. Adobe will stop distributing and updating Flash Player after December 31, 2020. Normally, a lack of notarization should mean that the app cannot be run on users’ Mac computers and laptops. Security researchers Patrick Wardle and Peter Datini have uncovered an adware campaign hosted on a website that tricked users into downloading a bogus update to Adobe Flash Player. Unfortunately, that seems to be exactly what has happened. Might users have a false sense of security – believing that if Apple’s vetting has given an app the all-clear and no message is displayed on running, that it must be safe to run? That’s all great in theory, but what if Apple accidentally approves a malicious app. If an app isn’t notarized, you’re prevented from running it on macOS.

#Latest adobe flash player update for mac software

It’s different from a regular “app review” of the software, and since February 2020 it has become a requirement for even Mac software distributed outside the Mac App Store to be notarized by Apple to allow it to run on macOS Catalina, the latest shipping version of the Mac operating system. A really cool feature of Apple macOS, from the security point of view at least, is that all software distributed via the Mac App Store has to be checked by Apple for malicious content – a process known as “notarizing.”