Adobe issues emergency update for Flash

 Adobe issued an emergency update to its Flash Player to fix two zero-day threats, the company announced yesterday. The updates affect all versions of Flash on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android.

The vulnerabilities currently are being exploited "in the wild," says Adobe's blog on the patches. According to the Kaspersky ThreatPost blog on the pair of zero-days, one attack targets "aerospace and other manufacturing companies" by tricking people into opening a Microsoft Word document with malicious Flash content embedded in it. The second zero-day targets Firefox and Safari on Mac OS X by tricking you into visiting Web sites hosting malicious Flash content, and it aims at Windows users by way of a Microsoft Word attachment delivered via e-mail.

Adobe listed on its blog the affected versions of Flash, and it recommended actions to take. Apple iOS is not affected, since it has never been compatible with Flash.

HP wants to help developers make apps faster

There's a new wave of application development tools on the market dubbed "agile" that aim to speed the delivery of applications and provide for a more collaborative environment. Today, HP took a big step toward making sure it is a relevant player in that market.

Agile software development is already used by up to one-third of development shops, according to Forrester, replacing the "waterfall" approach, which could take weeks or months to develop the software. In an agile world, code is written and deployed quickly, iterated on, market-tested and adjusted. That requires a whole new set of tools to manage these products.

Today, HP released two cloud-based agile application management tools -- HP Agile Manager to facilitate agile software development, and HP Performance Anywhere, which will help monitor and test applications post-launch.


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Agile Manager works in conjunction with HP's existing Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools, including Quality Center, and allows tasks to be assigned to individual developers while allowing code to be created, shared and edited.

One of the key tenants of an agile development model is that code should be created quickly and changed frequently. Performance Anywhere helps app owners know what changes need to be made after the app has been launched. Users create points of presence all around the world, either within their own WAN or on public cloud resources, which test how the application is running. If an error occurs, Performance Anywhere creates a flag, alerting the managers to the issue. Analytics tools even point to the potential cause of an issue -- be it an individual line of code, hardware issues, networking problems or any other variety of problems that could arise.

Both HP offerings are delivered as software as a service (SaaS), accessed through a Web portal. HP's Agile Manage is available today for $39 per user per month, with a three-month term. Performance Anywhere is not yet available, but is expected to cost $39 per application transaction per month plus $199 per server that runs the analytics software.