Update Adobe Flash Player

[KevinPAdobe]

Hello everyone,

I'm experiencing an issue with Adobe Flash player inside a business environment. Whenever users cold boot, they receive a prompt to update Adobe Flash Player. We would like this dialogue to stop appearing as users don't have administrator rights and can't update Adobe.

I've tried the following things:

• Right clicking a flash player video, navigating to Global Settings, going to the Advanced tab and making sure Never Check For Updates is checked (It is)
• Navigating to both C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash and C:\Windows\System32\Macromed\Flash and editing the mms.cfg file to look like this:

  • SilentAutoUpdateEnable=0

    AutoUpdateDisable=1

• Going to Services and manually disabling Adobe Flash Player Update Service and Adobe Acrobat Update Service
• Installing a redistributable version of Adobe Flash (15.0.0.239.) That did not have any effect either.

The update dialogue looks as follows:

Does anyone have any suggestions as to what to try next?

[pwillener]

I don't know why these settings apparently don't work.

The surest way that Flash Player won't issue any update notifications is pushing out the latest updates as soon as they become available.  (The current Flash Player version is 16.0.0.296)

[KevinPAdobe]

Well, I can't update as soon as updates become available as we view that as a potential security threat.

I'm just looking for someway I can force that update notification to stop appearing. If there's any ideas of things to try, it can't hurt to give it a go. I heard something about manually deleting a Runonce registry key to prevent the dialogue box from appearing. Not sure if this is really feasible or not...

[jeromiec83223024]

I'm pretty sure that this is a known bug, and that it's in the queue to get fixed.

You guys should take a good look at our Extended Support Release.  Each release of Flash Player includes security fixes.  With the increase in sophistication among bad actors over the last few years as well the prevalence of really good tools for comparing binaries, we know that bad actors are reverse-engineering fixes patched in the latest binaries within a pretty short window of time.  You're putting your network at far more risk by deferring updates than you are by avoiding change.

We understand that some organizations have policies that require testing for new feature-bearing releases, which is why the ESR is available.  We try to stick to a major product version for 6-18 months (usually until we're forced by some requirement of the infrastructure, etc) and we limit all changes to just security fixes.  This satisfies most company policies around pre-release certification, while giving you the latest security patches.

The ESR is available through the Flash Player distribution program:

http://www.adobe.com/products/players/flash-player-distribution.html

If you guys don't currently have a redistribution license, it's free and you should sign up now.  In the not-too-distant future, all of these assets will require authentication to get to, and you'll want to avoid the crush of applications when folks realize that they're unable to continue to gain access to the distributable assets without a valid redistribution license.