Tuesday 12 January 2021

Adobe Flash EOL Fix Blocked Applications Jan 12 2021

 Adobe Flash was made End of Life (EOL) at the end of December 2020 but Adobe gave users a short period of grace until turning the product off on 12 January 2021. As of today any websites will no longer be able to play Adobe Flash content as it is blocked by Adobe.

You can view a video of the steps here


However there is a way to still run Flash applications if you have access to Internet Explorer 11 and haven't applied the patch to remove Flash (KB4577586) We have successfully used this method to reactivate one of our applications that relied on Flash based graphs and had stopped working on Jan 12 but users are now able to access again. Bear in mind this should only be a temporary fix until you can rewrite the code, using Flash is not a long term solution. You need to create a file called MMS.cfg. Within the file you need to specify the domain and port that your flash application is running on, for example
https://https://www.bbc.co.uk/:80. This is the website/domain for your website that you need to enable flash to work on.

The port number for standard websites is 80 or 8080 but if you have access to your webserver you should be able to check the number in the configuration. For my application it was port 7777 but that was part of the URL I need to enter to access the site so fairly obvious. 
Other parameters in the file I used are as below:

EOLUninstallDisable=1 AutoUpdateDisable=1 EnableAllowList=1 AllowListURLPattern=https://www.bbc.co.uk/:80 The file mms.cfg needs to be copied to the following 2 locations: C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed\Flash C:\Windows\System32\Macromed\Flash Do not install this optional Microsoft update KB4577586: https://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/search.aspx?q=4577586