Cisco used Flash in equipment like ASA firewalls, SOHO switches, and UCS servers. However, there was a range of IT products created in the mid-teens that used a Flash console for administrative access.

The functionality of Flash has been ably replaced by HTML5. Flash was deprecated in 2020 and is no longer supported by the major browsers.

Why do we care? For the most part we don’t. Furthermore, the installer would commonly not clean up old versions, leaving an attack surface. The plug-in was updated seperately from the Operating System and browser, leading to many cases to persistence of older versions. In my experience, a big part of the problem with Flash was the update process. Flash was implemented on the client-side via a browser “plug-in” and was notorious for security issues. It allowed for highly interactive experiences and was used for streaming, video games, and for “application like” experiences inside the browser. Flash was a technology to extend the functionality of websites past what was possible with HTML at the time.

Pale moon flash