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clarkdevlin

clarkdevlin

clarkdevlin

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15 Mar 2004
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123
I've been hearing from an IT technician that internet explorer the latest version is very stable in terms of security, whereas the likes of mozilla and opera have easy access for hackers to invade your pc.

Just wondering if this is true?
 
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Going by the number of Secunia advisories released for each product, it's currently the other way round:

IE7: http://secunia.com/product/12366/ (3, 3 unpatched)
Opera 9: http://secunia.com/product/10615/ (2, 0 unpatched)
Fx 2: http://secunia.com/product/12434/ (1, 1 unpatched).

Firefox is currently suffering from a fairly bad vulnerability in its password storage functionality, while IE7 has 3 fairly bad exploits for spoofing websites (phishing etc.).

Being a new release out in the wild, IE7's security record is unproven against the other browsers so far.

Also depends what you mean by allowing 'hackers to invade your pc'. All of them allow you to download a file which could open up a nice doorway into your system, but that's not the browser's fault, that's down to the user.
 
Im pretty sure that IE7 suffers from the password bug too. Just hope they fix this soon, so stay off the porn and dodgey sites for the time being lol ;).
 
1337z0r said:
Im pretty sure that IE7 suffers from the password bug too. Just hope they fix this soon, so stay off the porn and dodgey sites for the time being lol ;).
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Or don't tell it to remember your passwords when it asks. The default option is "not now" for Firefox.
 
1337z0r said:
so stay off the porn and dodgey sites for the time being lol ;).
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Nothing stopping you carrying on using them, as long as you don't have a username/password for those sites ;). In fact, it's [more likely to be] a site like MySpace that raises the issue if they don't check user submitted data that they consequently display on the page.

Credentials can only be stolen from the site that you're visiting. For example, if the OcUK forums/vBulletin was exploited to allow someone to insert some arbitrary code into the page, they could capture your login details for the OcUK forum, but not for any other website.
 
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clarkdevlin said:
I've been hearing from an IT technician that internet explorer the latest version is very stable in terms of security, whereas the likes of mozilla and opera have easy access for hackers to invade your pc.
Click to expand...

Does he work for ******* by any chance?
 
GraemeUK said:
Does he work for *ahen* by any chance?
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Are you trying to imply that purple shirt employees are brain dead morons who know naff all about the computers they try and sell apart from what it says on the side of the box?

;)
 
Since upgrading to IE7 I get a lot of pop ups and browser add ons that mysteriously appear even after disabling and removing them.

I use Opera most of the time for general browsing, only IE for streaming audio and video files because it does it automatically in WMP whereas Opera and FF download the entire file first.

Since using Opera, I've gone off FF.
 
With FF2 and IE7 released they are both big targets for hackers. Personally I' perfer FF2 as it's jamed-packed with add-ons, etc

I've just never liked IE, I still have the old 6 on this computer.
 
Firefox > I.E. IMO

That said, I would like to see firefox properly support websites like the MSN Spaces, Windows Live Mail and Windows Update.

That way I could be rid of yet another MS product! :D
 
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