Firefox on an Infected Copy of Windows
Internet Explorer and Firefox are in a constant race for both the lion’s share of the browser market and for the top dog position when it comes down to which of the two products is more locked down from a security perspective. In terms of audience Internet Explorer has little contest from Firefox, although the open source browser has increased substantially its foothold on the market growing its share to approximately 15% at the end of October 2007, according to data from Net Applications. In contrast, IE accounts for the largest install base with 78%.
Security is a different matter altogether and a tad more difficult to measure up. The fact of
the matter is that the end goal of delivering top user protection is a combination of code quality and lack of vulnerabilities in the default design, along with an absent threat environment. The smackdown between Firefox and Internet Explorer as far as security goes is a battle that the open source browser has been winning at a slow pace, converting IE users. One of the reasons of the accelerated uptake of Firefox is connected directly with what the Mozilla product has to offer for user protection on top of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
And with the Windows platform being the world’s main playground for malicious code, security has to be at the top of features recommending one solution over another. The video fragment embedded at the bottom of this article, courtesy of Alex Eckelberry and Adam Thomas from security company Sunbelt, comes on the heels of the discovery of the Trojan DNSChanger that impacts both Windows and Mac OS X. The malware was pushed as a codec installation necessary to access free pornographic movies. The malicious code once deployed on a OS X or Windows machine, via one of the oldest tricks in the social engineering book, would go ahead and alter the DNS configuration of the infected machine.
“We’ve seen quite a bit of FUD out there about the Trojan DNSChanger (both Windows and Mac versions) hijacking your DNS settings and then redirecting you to malicious websites, stealing personal identities, killing your dog and even crank-calling your grandmother with naughty messages. Actually, it’s quite a bit more pedestrian than that, and we thought we’d set the record straight. This Trojan is all about generating affiliate commissions by redirecting search results. So if you google “Spyware”, you’ll get search results they want you to see,” Eckelberry stated.
The video will show how vulnerable Internet Explorer users are to DNS hijacks in comparison to those running Firefox. In addition, the video featuring Internet Explorer 6 provides users with a strong reason to upgrade to Firefox. Statistics from Net Applications indicate that at more than a year since Microsoft introduced IE7 43% of users have stuck with IE6. This is simply a bad move from a security point of view. In the same period of time Firefox users migrated in mass to version 2.0, with only 0.7% still hugging version 1.5 of the browser.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzNQ0OxNX8E[/youtube]
Security is a different matter altogether and a tad more difficult to measure up. The fact of
the matter is that the end goal of delivering top user protection is a combination of code quality and lack of vulnerabilities in the default design, along with an absent threat environment. The smackdown between Firefox and Internet Explorer as far as security goes is a battle that the open source browser has been winning at a slow pace, converting IE users. One of the reasons of the accelerated uptake of Firefox is connected directly with what the Mozilla product has to offer for user protection on top of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
And with the Windows platform being the world’s main playground for malicious code, security has to be at the top of features recommending one solution over another. The video fragment embedded at the bottom of this article, courtesy of Alex Eckelberry and Adam Thomas from security company Sunbelt, comes on the heels of the discovery of the Trojan DNSChanger that impacts both Windows and Mac OS X. The malware was pushed as a codec installation necessary to access free pornographic movies. The malicious code once deployed on a OS X or Windows machine, via one of the oldest tricks in the social engineering book, would go ahead and alter the DNS configuration of the infected machine.
“We’ve seen quite a bit of FUD out there about the Trojan DNSChanger (both Windows and Mac versions) hijacking your DNS settings and then redirecting you to malicious websites, stealing personal identities, killing your dog and even crank-calling your grandmother with naughty messages. Actually, it’s quite a bit more pedestrian than that, and we thought we’d set the record straight. This Trojan is all about generating affiliate commissions by redirecting search results. So if you google “Spyware”, you’ll get search results they want you to see,” Eckelberry stated.
The video will show how vulnerable Internet Explorer users are to DNS hijacks in comparison to those running Firefox. In addition, the video featuring Internet Explorer 6 provides users with a strong reason to upgrade to Firefox. Statistics from Net Applications indicate that at more than a year since Microsoft introduced IE7 43% of users have stuck with IE6. This is simply a bad move from a security point of view. In the same period of time Firefox users migrated in mass to version 2.0, with only 0.7% still hugging version 1.5 of the browser.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzNQ0OxNX8E[/youtube]
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