14 DAY TRIAL // I've read a material on SecurityFocus that made me realize two things: one, that having newer browsers doesn't necessarily mean better ones, and second, that Firefox and Opera really kick Internet Explorer's ass! Now, let me explain what I mean: some researchers from the Honeynet Project did a study to see how older versions of these browsers react to threats. The results were great, as only IE got compromised. So, what those techies did was to get a bundle of nasty URLs that are bound to harm your PC, then they started visiting them. What they have disclosed is the fact that the FireFox and Opera versions they used - though very old - were nor compromised.
They had the FireFox 1.5.0 and Opera 8.0.0 browsers installed, and even though they admit them to have a lot of vulnerabilities, nothing bad actually happened when they visited those sites. Wow! I'm sorry I can't say the same about Microsoft's software (Internet Explorer 6 SP2) that got compromised many times. So what I'm thinking is that hackers move on with technology, they know new updates appear and strive for their malware to affect the newer software versions. I guess that's why the older programs did not have any problems.
I was pretty much disappointed that IE's vulnerabilities got it compromised; and that's not because I'm a big fan of Microsoft, or anything like that, but I do know that a lot of users don't bother installing better browsers on their machines and just go with the default one. Many people have Windows, which means they have IE installed as well, so if they are not careful, they could be in for a lot of trouble!
The good part about IE, though, is that if properly patched it is less likely to get compromised. As I've read on the same site mentioned above, a fully-patched version of Internet Explorer 6 visited 2,289 malicious sites, none of which managed to compromise the system. So if you're using IE, patch it up, people!