Mozilla blocks vulnerable Adobe flash versions

A day after Facebook’s newly appointed Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos took to Twitter to call for more rapid moves to force Flash’s extinction as the plugin was reportedly being used to spread malware on users’ systems via security exploits, the head of Firefox Support has claimed to have blocked all the vulnerable versions of Adobe Flash in its Firefox browser.

On July 14, Mark Schmidt, head of Firefox Support posted on twitter, “BIG NEWS!! All versions of Flash are blocked by default in Firefox as of now.”

According to a news report published on TheNextWeb, three major Flash vulnerabilities were discovered during security firm Hacking Team’s leaked 400GB worth of documents, which allow malicious files to execute code and install malware on victims’ computers and product source code leaked online.

“Mozilla has noted that Flash will remain blocked until Adobe releases a version that isn’t being actively exploited by publicly known vulnerabilities,” the report read.

It is also said that Mozilla is trialing Shumway, an HTML5-based efficient renderer for the SWF format that’s used with Flash files.