We’re drawing close to the end of an era.

The writing has been on the wall for Adobe’s Flash player for quite some time, and the company has set a firm date of January 12th, 2012 as its official end of life.

Recently, they took another important step closer by releasing what will be their final Flash Player update.

With it will be a note with stronger language asking users to uninstall the app before its official end of life. It matters because there are no more security patches coming, and it’s almost a given that additional security flaws will be found and increasingly exploited. If you’ve still got the app installed on your machine, you’re not only putting your system at risk, but if you’re connected to a corporate network, you’re putting the entire company at risk too.

At the end of the year, Adobe is planning to push out a notification to all users who still have the app installed, warning them again that the software is nearing its end of life. However, of course, even that is unlikely to be sufficient to prompt everyone to uninstall. There’s bound to be a small subset of the user base that will keep on using it until the last day, and then forget to uninstall it, which will put untold numbers of systems and networks at risk.

If you own a company of any size, it pays to keep the date January 12th, 2021 firmly in mind. Be sure that your IT staff has a plan in place to check every PC and handheld device connected to your network to be sure that the Flash Player has been uninstalled. For years, hackers have used Flash exploits to gain easy access to networks around the world. Don’t let your company be their next target.