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On the same track than this old question: How do I tell if the Flash Player Installer is a virus?

I see a new proposal regularly poping up during my web browsing:

FlashPlayer update proposal popup

Nothing within this installer tells me which version is here proposed.

If I check within:

Adobe Flash Player Player Install Manager >
About Adobe Flash Player Install Manager

I can see that this is the version: 11.8.800.168
FlashPlayer Install Manager version

At the same time, the actual version distributed on one of the official Adobe web servers:

http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/

is announcing Version 11.9.900.152.

How may I verify the seriousness and origin of the popup window I got?

How may I check the version which is proposed to install on my system?

If I can't get a simple answer to these 2 fundamental security questions (which are more extreme since we know how Adobe consider security questions), how may I get rid of such unusable popups ?

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    This sort of begs the question: how can you trust any update to a product that has had so many updates that are intended to fix security. At what point do we say "you've taken enough attempts at fixing security bugs, we don't trust you anymore"? (assuming you trust the binary came from where it should have in the first place).
    – mah
    Nov 13, 2013 at 17:33
  • 1
    I wish I had a better answer than to avoid the software entirely. From the web page settings manager, to the difficulty to source a verifiable download from Adobe directly, to the amount of side-loading of threats, not to mention how flash itself has a long history of being a very insecure thing to have running itself make me hard pressed to give a good answer here.
    – bmike ♦
    Dec 30, 2013 at 23:10

2 Answers 2

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Unfortunately, if you're going to trust Adobe and their distribution of the Flash plugins, this is what you're going to get. Many users are now removing Flash and trusting Google to keep the plugins current in Chrome, but this has the same level of security through obscurity.

If you're serious about these updates, you could close the window and go directly to Adobe to check your version and manually download updates: http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/find-version-flash-player.html.

Best of luck!

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Verify the authenticity of the disk image using either MD5 or SHA1 checksum. Here are both for the latest Adobe Flash Player disk image at time of writing:

  • MD5 faa46444c70d6b21fcad27472d1684c7
  • SHA1 9a0af6e02e13fe00d2f4a72d6cc54797eadae20d

To find the MD5/SHA1 of your download, run the following Terminal commands:

openssl md5 /path/to/dmg
openssl sha1 /path/to/dmg

$ openssl md5 /Users/NB/Downloads/AdobeFlashPlayerInstaller_11_ltrosxd_aaa_aih.dmg
MD5 (/Users/NB/Downloads/AdobeFlashPlayerInstaller_11_ltrosxd_aaa_aih.dmg)= faa46444c70d6b21fcad27472d1684c7
$ openssl sha1 /Users/NB/Downloads/AdobeFlashPlayerInstaller_11_ltrosxd_aaa_aih.dmg
SHA1(/Users/NB/Downloads/AdobeFlashPlayerInstaller_11_ltrosxd_aaa_aih.dmg)= 9a0af6e02e13fe00d2f4a72d6cc54797eadae20d
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    Where may one find the original checksums for a given version number? My hunt for them on adobe.com was a total failure.
    – dan
    Nov 14, 2013 at 9:57

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