Mozilla's popularity stressing its security image

Rift · Post by **Rift** » Fri Sep 30, 2005 5:23 pm

Critics of the open-source Firefox browser took its security track record to task this week after a biannual Internet security report noted that the application had almost twice as many vulnerabilities as Internet Explorer in the first half of 2005, with a higher fraction of those flaws being severe.

"Mozilla's popularity has gone from almost zero to double digits, so they have had to deal with a lot of sudden attention," said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer for antivirus firm F-Secure. "Since Mozilla has become popular, people have been looking for more vulnerabilities."

And researchers appear to be finding flaws with greater frequency. In the first six months of 2005, the Mozilla family of browsers had 25 vulnerabilities, with 72 percent rated as high severity, according to the Internet Security Threat Report released by Symantec this week. During the same period, Microsoft's Internet Explorer had 13 confirmed vulnerabilities, with 62 percent rated as high severity, the report said. Symantec is the parent company of SecurityFocus.

That poses a problem for the open-source browser's security image. Much of the popularity of the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox has been built on the browser being a secure alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. In June 2004, a pop-up toolbar's ability to infect computers when their users browsed a malicious Web site with Internet Explorer gave Firefox additional momentum to start claiming market share from Microsoft's well-known browser. Mozilla's browsers accounted for almost 7 percent of popular Web traffic as of May 2005, the most recent data available, according to analytics firm WebSideStory.

Story continues : [url=\"http://securityfocus.com/news/11327\"]HERE[/url]

radar · Post by **radar** » Fri Sep 30, 2005 11:08 pm

Meh. It's still better than IE.

Post by **Jim** » Sat Oct 01, 2005 2:21 am

[quote name=\'radar\' post=\'29113\' date=\'Sep 30 2005, 07:08 PM\']Meh. It's still better than IE.[/quote]
<img src=\'http://www.killanet.net/forum3/public/s ... >/good.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\'(Y)\' /> you know it.

Rift · Post by **Rift** » Sat Oct 01, 2005 3:06 am

lol for versatility and usage definately, it sucks though that i spawned a shell off on this computer on a port with just a webpage, not my creation btw it was a disclosure from someone. but just a simple webpage and mozilla/firefox allows your computer's hdd to become a full access server, reading/writing files, deleting, get'ng, making dirs, deleting dirs, running progs, etc... lol but ie has the same problems. we just have to get used to relying on our own means of security. it's like there are some people who depend on the police, and there are those of us that think, yeah the police might help, but who cares ive got : <insert your favorite thing> a katana waiting for you. With the way technology is, nothing is safe. it's all just waiting to be exploited. so yeah... firefox over ie lol

Post by **Marko** » Sat Oct 01, 2005 5:29 am