Adobe hires new chief security officer for post-Flash era

San Francisco, Nov 3 (SocialNews.XYZ) Adobe has hired Mark Adams, former Blizzard Entertainment chief security officer (CSO), as its new security head while the software major gets ready for the post-Flash Player era.

Adams replaces Brad Arkin who left Adobe after 12 years in March to join networking giant Cisco as its new Chief Security and Trust Officer.

In his new role, Adams will report to Adobe Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Abhay Parasnis.

"He will work closely with the key cross functional teams such as IT, Product and Legal, to continue to drive and maintain the processes required to help protect Adobe and our customers," Adobe said in a statement on Monday.

Adams comes into the frame when Adobe is retiring its Flash Player app at the end of the year.

Adobe will stop updating and distributing Flash Player after December 31, 2020 due to the diminished usage of the technology and the availability of better, more secure options such as HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly.

Some enterprise customers may still require Flash Player commercial support and licensing beyond 2020 to run internal business systems.

"For these instances, enterprise customers should contact our official distribution licensing partner HARMAN," Adobe said recently, adding it will continue issuing regular Flash Player security patches while maintaining operating system and browser compatibility through the end of 2020.

"The end users will be prompted on their machines to uninstall Adobe Flash Player later this year".

Microsoft is releasing an update called "Update for Removal of Adobe Flash Player" for users that will permanently kill Flash Player on Windows.

Microsoft has announced to end support for Adobe Flash Player on Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer 11 at the end of 2020.

Source: IANS