A Good Reason to get rid of that Big Blue "E"

[gopher_yarrowzoo]

Here is a good reason to get rid of Internet Explorer from you desktop and install something like Firefox / Chrome / Opera and a no script addon (although I think any scripted attack is pretty much aimed at IE's flaws so don't see the point), Adblocker yes, no script - not really.

...
"There is absolutely nothing preventing attackers from using the exploit in a drive-by attack (and we can, unfortunately, expect that this will happen very soon)," Bojan Zdrnja, a handler at the Sans Internet Storm Center wrote here. He went on to say the exploit code was the result of reverse engineering Microsoft's patch.
...

That's right the very patch that MS issued to fix this flaw is being used to exploit the flaw on unpatched machines which well there will probably be many...


Full story: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02...tacks_go_wild/

[Moogie]

Mmmmm…. Situation normal – “The sky is falling!”

Seriously, one of the main reasons that IE is a target is that it is part of Windows, which is the 800 lb. Gorilla in the personal computer world, and therefore, the easiest target for these scummy Russian and Chinese thieves. Further, I’d take a fairly serious bet that most, if not all, of the Chinese hackers are backed by the gov’t of the PRC. Likewise the Russian thieves may be backed by the Russian gov’t.

As for the Microsoft haters out there – a lot of folks have what I call “Microsoft Derangement Syndrome”, or MDS. Very similar to BDS, and for much the same reason – success breeds envy in some folks, especially if the successful party is either:

A – a successful political conservative
B – a successful company

[gopher_yarrowzoo]

Yes totally agree with you there Moogie, the main reason its targeted is its market share and also due to it's many "flaws" sorry "features" that make it so easy to get around the security chain, I mean Vista with all it's hyped up uber security is only as strong as it's weakest link which is IE 7 which is only as stong as it's weakest part that being ActiveX and cross-site script prevention..
I mean I can see why ActiveX is popular really I can but also Why oh Why do people who think they can program write them it's about as bad as some Java stuff I've seen that and MS code is sloppy and bloated at times.
Although I've seen sloppy n bloated code elsewhere like I said I've seen bad Java programs "sold" as professional programs for doing things with like the one I use a lot is a remote viewer for a series of Networkable CCTV DVR's and well it just eats memory over time, doesn't reliquish it at all I mean it should load up, load the pictures up it needs, with space to decode the stream and not really grow...
Thankfully there are good programmers out there that abhor bloated code and write neat fast code...

I'll stop there..
IE 7 is a step in the right direction but IE 8 breaks so many sites it's unreal it even breaks MS own website if reports are true, due to the "MS" way things get done, Firefox has it's flaws too but sometimes it's down to the individual site rather than Firefox or IE, I know of a few that basically tell me to get lost and upgrade my browser as this one isn't supported.