Bombarded - please stop

Question

I am getting 5 or 6 Update Adobe Flash Player invitations a day after several years with none. Are they genuine or is it a hack?

jeromiec83223024 · Accepted Answer

I've seen a little more traffic on this over the last couple days, and I suspect that you're talking about Flash Player on MacOS 10.6. Flash Player requires MacOS 10.10 or higher to run, and I think that you're stuck in this loop where you're running an insecure player, but you have no way to upgrade. The last update for MacOS 10.6 was released in 2011, so you're missing several years of security updates to the browser and operating system. It's probably not a great idea to browse the web in that state.

Your best option is to update to a recent version of MacOS. If the hardware doesn't support it, then you're probably due for an upgrade. Both Amazon and Walmart sell refurbished Mac hardware, and you can score some pretty cheap (by Apple standards anyway) upgrades if you don't mind being a generation or two behind the state of the art.

In the meantime, you don't want to browse the web with an outdated Flash Player. That's problematic.

You can run the uninstaller here. which will remove Flash and stop the update notifications.

Uninstall Flash Player - Mac:
https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/uninstall-flash-player-mac-os.html

jeromiec83223024 · Answer

There's not a lot of useful detail here that would allow me to make a guess about what's going on. Like the other folks that have replied here have indicated, a screenshot would be useful.

Without knowing what operating system you're on, it's hard to give you useful instructions but a quick google for "how to take a screenshot on <your operating system here>" would probably get the job done.

Here are instructions on how to post a screenshot, once you take one:
https://forums.adobe.com/docs/DOC-7043#jive_content_id_How_do_I_attach_a_screenshot

Given that Flash Player worked fine until a few days ago, it seems unlikely that you're getting bombarded with legitimate notifications.

If you have a commodity wireless router and you've never updated the firmware, you might want to unplug it, plug it back in, then go find and install the relevant firmware updates. There are vulnerablities (which were mostly patched a year or two ago) in commodity routers, which were leveraged by bad actors to insert fake Flash Player update notifications in web pages, which linked to malware downloads. Since everyone has Flash Player, it's a great thing to impersonate.

Those worms didn't typically persist through a reboot of the router (they could generally only write to volatile memory), so power-cycling it will clear it temporarily, and updating will prevent it from happening again.

Aside from that, sometimes if the filesystem is messed up or the disk is failing, the process that checks for updates might not be able to read or write to it's configuration file (which checks to see when the last time it checked for an update was), but even then, we only typically check once a day, and if you have Flash set to automatically update, it would never pop a dialog in the first place (which is a big part of why we recommend that as the default setting).

None of those things have anything to do with the volume of spam that you're getting. Some email providers are definitely better than others at filtering spam, which is probably your only good recourse on that front.

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