Thursday, December 29, 2005

If You are Viewing this Blog In IE..

Go download FireFox. Do it now:
The researchers tracked three browsers (MSIE, Firefox, Opera) in 2004 and counted which days they were "known unsafe." Their definition of "known unsafe": a remotely exploitable security vulnerability had been publicly announced and no patch was yet available.

MSIE was 98% unsafe. There were only 7 days in 2004 without an unpatched publicly disclosed security hole.

Firefox was 15% unsafe. There were 56 days with an unpatched publicly disclosed security hole. 30 of those days were a Mac hole that only affected Mac users. Windows Firefox was 7% unsafe.
That is mind-boggling.

1 comment:

bill said...

And if I may add, if you're using Outlook as your mail client, STOP. There are plenty of decent third party clients out there. I used pegasus for years, but have recently switched to all online accounts (gmail).

As most viruses are coded to exploit the gaping security holes in IE and Outlook, the biggest security precautions you can take is to not to use either. At work, I don't mind - it isn't my computer and we have a solid support department. And while I do have IE loaded for the rare occasions when no other browser will work, I have never allowed Outlook on our home computers.