What damage can adobe flash player do to a linux machine?

[aloprot]

Hi, I hope I posted in the right section, if not I kindly ask a moderator to move it where it belongs(I didn't find the section). Like the title says I would like to know what damage can adobe flash player can actually do to a linux machine. Right now I am running ubuntu 10.10 and flash player. I have read adobe system security buletin and saw a lot of vulnerabilities cross platform and linux is affected too. But I'm curious, what can this vulnerabilities do to your linux machine. I don't like it but unfortunately I have to use it because I go to a lot of websites with flash content and gnash can't help me, yet.
Thank you very much!

[lovinglinux]

Most of the last security alerts I read about flash stated that a specially crafted malicious flash content could crash the player and allow full control of your machine.

Besides that, if you use flash all the time I suspect it could diminish hardware life expectancy, because it uses a lot of CPU. This is just a guess, because I have no data about how long you can use your machine in such conditions and how it would affect your hardware.

[dcstar]

Most of the last security alerts I read about flash stated that a specially crafted malicious flash content could crash the player and allow full control of your machine.
..........

And if you read them carefully, most of them refer to Windows and the references to Unix/Linux seem very (very) difficult to determine.

I haven't read one example of Flash content damaging or compromising a Linux install since I started using Ubuntu at version 4.10.

If you happen to stumble onto some web site with malicious Flash content and - at worst - it mucks up your browsing session then I don't consider that much to justify the amount of fear people seem to have.

There might be a risk, but it seems that in the Linux world it is a tiny risk.

[HermanAB]

Howdy,

In my experience, the worst thing it does is make Firefox freeze, so you got to restart it. I would not classify that as a security problem.

[aloprot]

Thank you!

@lovinglinux: Were you ironic?

[lovinglinux]

@lovinglinux: Were you ironic?

Maybe

[nacho32]

It could cause your computer to explode blowing every window out of your house.

[aloprot]

I don't understand, why so much irony? I just asked a simple question, I'm not an expert, I do not know. nacho32,either you give me a relevant answer or you can stop posting pictures like that. What do you want to prove?

[NoBugs!]

Most of the last security alerts I read about flash stated that a specially crafted malicious flash content could crash the player and allow full control of your machine.

It shouldn't be possible for a malicious script to "take over" your computer, unless you run your browser as root. By default Firefox and other browsers only have user's privileges, so a malicious script would at worst have same privilege as normal user.

[dcstar]

It shouldn't be possible for a malicious script to "take over" your computer, unless you run your browser as root. By default Firefox and other browsers only have user's privileges, so a malicious script would at worst have same privilege as normal user.

Will you people pay attention?, all of those articles actually refer to versions of Windows where it is possible for malicious code to run with full privileges.

How do you think all of the millions of zombie machines that spam the world right now got compromised?, it wasn't by running a modern version of Linux.