said by NICK ADSL UK:Over 450 million Internet-enabled desktops have Adobe Shockwave Player installed. These users have access to some of the best content the Web has to offer - including dazzling 3D games and entertainment, interactive product demonstrations, and online learning applications. Shockwave Player displays Web content that has been created using Adobe Director.
Yes, that's the company line.
But in real life, I think it's very safe to say that fewer and fewer people use Shockwave.
Do [you] actually use it? If so, you are in a small group.
Why You Should Ditch Adobe Shockwave
This author has long advised computer users who have Adobe‘s Shockwave Player installed to junk the product, mainly on the basis that few sites actually require the browser plugin, and because it’s yet another plugin that requires constant updating.
But I was positively shocked this week to learn that this software introduces a far more pernicious problem: Turns out, it (Shockwave) bundles a component of Adobe Flash that is more than 15 months behind on security updates, and which can be used to backdoor virtually any computer running it.
My re-education on this topic comes courtesy of Will Dormann, a computer security expert who writes threat advisories for Carnegie Mellon University’s CERT. In a recent post on the release of the latest bundle of security updates for Adobe’s Flash player, Dormann commented that Shockwave actually provides its own version of the Flash runtime, and that the latest Shockwave version released by Adobe has none of the recent Flash fixes.
Worse yet, Dormann said, the current version of Shockwave for both Windows and Mac systems lacks any of the Flash security fixes released since January 2013. By my count, Adobe has issued nearly 20 separate security updates for Flash since then, including fixes for several dangerous zero-day vulnerabilities....
Krebs on Security (May 2014)
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krebsonsecurity.com/2014 ··· ockwave/I got rid of Shockwave Player last year because of obvious security issues and because it’s really not needed much of anywhere.
Ken Harthun, Network Admin and IT consultant (May 2014)
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itknowledgeexchange.tech ··· yer-now/Finally, Adobe released a security update for its Shockwave Player software for Windows and Mac.
This is another Adobe product that I have long urged people to uninstall, largely because most users have no need for Shockwave and it’s just as buggy as Flash but it doesn’t get updated nearly enough.
Krebs on Security (July 2015: Current)
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krebsonsecurity.com/2015 ··· y-fixes/Summary: Very few people need Shockwave, and it adds risk. Those who don't need it should remove it, NOT update it endlessly.
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