Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Gone Phishing
Which web browser do you use? Gone over to Firefox have you, to be safer? Think again.
The Register has an article about the rise in trojan horse programs. highlights include;

Of the 13 vulns affecting IE in 2004, nine were classified as "high severity". Of the 21 vulnerabilities affecting the Mozilla browsers, Symantec classified 11 as "high severity". Firefox users enjoyed an easier ride with just seven affecting "high severity" vulns over the report period.

Symantec says there have been few attacks in the wild against Mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, or Safari, but the jury is still out on whether these browsers represent a more secure alternative to IE.


The article also comments on the rise in Phishing scams, this is where you get an email asking you to confirm your account details for internet banking etc, I get a lot of these pretending to be from ebay. The email will ask you to click a link, which takes you to a fake version of the website you think you are visiting, and then log in to reset your account, at which point they grab your password etc and steal all your money.
I would imagine that a lot of even fairly web savvy people get caught like this and it is obviously lucrative judging by this statement;

Symantec also noted a marked rise in email scams over second half of 2004. The firm's BrightMail anti-spam filters blocked an average of 33 million phishing emails a week in December 2004 compared to nine million a week in July 2004.

So get yerself a firewall and antivirus software, if you use broadband get a router/firewall, visit www.grc.com and use their "shields up" utility to find out how secure your pc is, and remember no proper company will ask you for passwords etc.
Be careful out there on the interweb because here be dragons, and thieving bastards.

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