Did anyone hear about the security breach on internet explorer?
there is a security breach and they are trying to fix it today. it has been in the news these last couple of days. i just found out about it tues. night.
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Internet Explorer is crap. What do you expect?
@damien…I didn’t know that is was like that. It came with the computer so that is what I was using til last night.
That’s the only reason why it still has such a big market share – because it comes on the computer. A couple of popular choices you should try are Firefox and Google Chrome but pretty much any modern browser is better than IE.
@damien Could you explain specifically, why it is better?
I hear people say it is less “stable”. I haven’t (knowingly) had a problem w/ IE. What kind of problems should I be looking for…>?
@damien.. yes that is what i went with was google chrome.it is so much faster too. thanks!!
Both Firefox and Chrome are faster, more secure, and more up-to-date with standards, security, phising, etc. than IE. Because they’re both run on open-source engines, when bugs and flaws are spotted, they’re fixed much faster because they’ve got entire communities behind them rather than some dev team as M$.
Google shows a million reasons… http://www.google.com/search?q=why+is+internet+explorer+so+crap? :P
Thanks damien….I will take a look :)
Microsoft: Emergency Patch for IE Flaw Coming Wednesday
Microsoft is signaling that it plans to ship an emergency software update on Wednesday to fix a dangerous security hole in its Internet Explorer Web browser that thousands of compromised Web sites have been using to install malicious software.
Microsoft says the critical flaw is present in all versions of IE, from IE5 all the way up through IE8 Beta 2. In an unusually frank blog post, the company estimated that about 0.2 percent of Windows users worldwide may have been exposed to Web sites containing exploits that try to attack this vulnerability.
While one in every 500 IE users may not sound like a large number, Microsoft said the frequency of attacks is increasing dramatically.
“That percentage may seem low, however it still means that a significant number of users have been affected. The trend for now is going upwards: we saw an increase of over 50 percent in the number of reports today compared to yesterday,” wrote Microsoft’s Ziv Mador and Tareq Saade.
In a blog post on Dec. 13, security firm Trend Micro said it found evidence that at least 6,000 Web sites had been hacked and seeded with code designed to install password-stealing software when vulnerable users visit the sites with IE. And that was three days ago.
This would be the second time this year that Microsoft will have broken out of its monthly patch cycle to address a pressing security problem. In October, Redmond issued an out-of-band release to fix a critical flaw in Windows.
Microsoft usually issues patches on the second Tuesday of each month, but signs that hackers were exploiting an unpatched flaw in all versions of IE showed up the day after this month’s Patch Tuesday. Sometimes known as “Exploit Wednesday,” attackers have begun using this day for exploitation as it gives them the longest lead time until Microsoft gets around to fixing it, unless the company issues an out-of-band update.
Security Fix will have more information on Wednesday, after Microsoft releases the update. Stay tuned. this is from the Washington post last night,.
Internet Explorer has always had issues, security ones are not new, but never one this big. Many problems stem from how tightly integrated IE is with the Windows operating system (leading to the anti-trust lawsuit filed by the US Government which is similar to the recent anti-trust suit in Europe regarding Microsoft and its Windows Media Player offering). For this reason, alternative browsers are often more secure. Another reason alternative browsers are more stable is because they are often times open source – this draws developers to work on it for free, finding and fixing bugs of all types much quicker.
I have to admit I laughed when I heard about the security issue. I of course only use IE when I test sites I design. I use Firefox primarily and have been since it came out. Before then I was using other alternative browsers. I will never use IE primarily no matter how good they try to make it. I loathe Microsoft with a passion. Nowadays they are not doing anything that’s worthy of my attention. Even Windows 7, the next version of Windows after Vista, is not exciting me at all.
There have been constant security flaws in Internet Explorer, since it was originally released years ago. Microsoft knows that most people either don’t care about or aren’t aware of computer security issues, and so doesn’t invest a lot of effort into security.
For those of us who pay attention to computer security issues, this is old news—mainly because we’ve been hearing it every few months since approximately 1995.
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