Category: Security
Weekly Browsers Recap + Bonus Links, February 21st
FavBrowser.com
- IE9 RC: 2 Million Downloads
- Majority Of Web Browsers Are Unpatched
- Director of Firefox Leaves Mozilla
- Firefox 5 First Look
- Firefox 4 RC1 Coming Next Week
- Taking a Look at the New Google Chrome 10 Beta
- Gmail Now Uses Chrome’s Built-In Viewer To Open PDFs
- Introducing Google Chrome Web Search Blocklist Extension
- Download Opera 11.10
- Opera 11.10 Coming
- Windows Phone Internet Explorer 9 Mobile vs. Safari
- Opera Mini for iPad
Weekly Questions Recap, February 21st
Don’t forget that you can receive points for asking/answering questions and redeem them for cool prizes.
Unresolved
- Web-browser battle: which are you using and why?
- Suggest some skin/theme for firefox, opera, chrome?
- Why does Opera fail to grab a good per cent of user base like IE/Firefox/Chrome?
- What was the first browser you ever used?
- Help to Disable Panel While Checking Feeds?
Answered
Majority Of Web Browsers Are Unpatched
Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of security risk and compliance management provider Qualys, revealed that approximately 80% of web browsers are susceptible to exploits of bugs that have already been patched. Kandek attributed this mostly to Windows, saying “All the different patching mechanisms are confusing, a bit of this and some of that.”
As discovered by BrowserCheck (which scans Windows, Mac and Linux machines for vulnerable browsers along with browser plug-ins), Oracle’s Java was the most probable plug-in to be outdated for the second year in a row, comprising a total of 40% scanned systems. Adobe’s Reader and Apple’s QuickTime were second and third, taking up 32% and 25% respectively.
Proposed solutions include:
- Microsoft taking charge of patching crucial third party plug-ins via single updater.
- Moving to HTML5, so browsers would no longer require various audio and video processing plug-ins.
Weekly Browsers Recap + Bonus Links, February 14th
FavBrowser.com
- Download Internet Explorer 9 RC
- Firefox 5, 6 and 7 Coming in 2011
- Firefox 5 with Windows 64 Bit Support Coming
- Download Firefox 4 Beta 11
- Firefox Ignores Font Family?
- Firefox Borrows Google’s Chrome Update Procedure
- Opera: 100 000 000 Mobile Users
- Download Adobe Flash Player 10.2 Final
- CSS Checkbox Styling Nightmare (Pic)
- HTML5: Framerate Fest
Pwn2Own: Google to Give Away CR-48 Laptop and $20,000
The 5th Pwn2Own contest is here and there are some special treats for all you exploiters.
In addition to already offered prizes by Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) (a total is $105,000), Google Inc. will also be giving away a CR-48 laptop running Google Chrome OS and $20,000 to one lucky hacker who will exploit a security hole in Google Chrome web browser.
Contestants are welcomed to hack the following browsers:
Microsoft Internet Explorer
Apple Safari
Mozilla Firefox
Google Chrome
All of them will be running on a 64-bit, Windows 7 or OS X machines.
As for Opera inclusion, it’s still the same “low market share” argument.
Weekly Browsers Recap, January 17th
FavBrowser.com
• Microsoft to Reveal Internet Explorer Mobile Plans
During the CES, one of the audience members has asked Microsoft’s Dean…
• Google Chrome Release Cycle
Google has recently published an interesting release cycle slideshow for Google Chrome…
Continue Reading
Mozilla Leaks 44,000 User Passwords
Oops
It looks like the database of 44,000 inactive addons.mozilla.org accounts has been mistakenly left on a public Mozilla server.
According to the official blog post, it affects accounts created prior to April 9th, 2009 that use older, md5-based password hashes. As of today, all the data is secured with SHA-512 password hash.
Impacted users were notified on December 27th and potential treat has been already removed.
Weekly Browsers Recap, December 27th
FavBrowser.com
• Internet Explorer is the Best Browser
A picture.
• Now Open This With…
A picture.
Continue Reading
Opera Responds to NSS Labs Browser Security Research Report
Thomas Ford, the PR Manager of Opera Software has also raised some concerns about the recent NSS Labs Report results (where Opera scored 0%) and responded with the following statement (as from ConceivablyTech email).
We have some concerns with the results posted by NSS. First, we are unclear as to why they received no results. We use AVG and Yandex, among others, for our fraud protection solution. Both have performed well in our testing. It is odd that they received no results from our data providers.
The latter could indicate that what NSS Labs actually tests is the providers that Microsoft uses in IE. As such, the test almost becomes a QA test of Microsoft’s own system rather than a real test.
Google Responds to NSS Labs Browser Security Research Report
With the recent release of NSS Labs Security Research Report, Google has responded with the following statement:
These sponsored tests are limited in their sole focus on socially engineered malware, while excluding vulnerabilities in plug-ins or browsers themselves. Additionally, the testing methodology isn’t available in a way that can be independently verified. Google Chrome was built with security in mind from the beginning and emphasizes protection of users from drive-by downloads and plug-in vulnerabilities — for example, we recently introduced a new security sandbox for Flash Player.
As a reminder: Google Chrome 6 blocked 3.4% of all socially engineered malware, while IE9 – 99%.
