Posted on 06/30/2004 5:50:46 AM PDT by stainlessbanner
US CERT (the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team), is advising people to ditch Internet Explorer and use a different browser after the latest security vulnerability in the software was exposed.
A statement on the CERT site said: "There are a number of significant vulnerabilities in technologies relating to the IE domain/zone security model, the DHTML object model, MIME type determination, and ActiveX. It is possible to reduce exposure to these vulnerabilities by using a different web browser, especially when browsing untrusted sites." CERT otherwise recommends users to set security settings to high and disable JavaScript
Malicious code, dubbed variously as "Scob" or "Download.Ject", originally posted last week on a Russian website, could be downloaded secretly onto websites using Microsoft's Internet Information Server 5.0. The code could then be used to log keystrokes made by visitors to the site - so long as they used Internet Explorer as their browser. Information, including passwords, was then to be emailed to the criminals behind the atack.
Microsoft said that it was unaware of widespread consumer impact and noted that the Russian site had been taken offline. It said some enterprise users of Windows 2000 Server, specifically users running IIS 5.0, were being targeted by "Download.Ject". According to MS, this is not a trojan or worm but "a targeted manual attack by individuals or entities towards a specific server". It said users should use a firewall, ensure they have the latest software updates and use anti-virus software.
Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman, called on users to switch on auto-update so that patches would spread faster. Speaking to Reuters in Australia at the weekend, he vowed to "guarantee that the average time to fix will come down. The thing we have to do is not only get these patches done very quickly...we also have to convince people to turn on auto-update."®
ping
Go mac. Safari... New OSX tiger does it all.. Go mac and you will never go back!
You have to be careful trusting these foreign websites who are often anti-American in their reporting and want to push open source software on us. Where's the link to cert? Is this it? I don't see where it says what the foreign website claims.
http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/alerts/SA04-163A.html
http://www.microsoft.com/security/incident/settings.mspx
My suggestion would be you turn on the security in the IE browser as above, use IE for windows update and switch to mozilla suite 1.7 . Blocks pop ups and most email viruses without need for user intervention. Has some spam filtering built in.
Keep your virus checker up to date, and hope for the best.
If you really want off the security treadmill to oblivion, switch to the penguin.
Can I upgrade from Netscape to mozilla and have my mail and bookmarks also move over?
You have to wonder if that's not a motivating factor for some of these hackers...we have heard open source advocates such as Eric Raymond admit OSS ties to hackers, although he repudiated them of course.
I have been running Freebsd on a webserver for two years, solid as a rock. I think I am going to move everything over to it that I can. It's only autocad that I miss.
I switched to Mozilla yesterday. I like it. It also transferred my bookmark list so I didn't have to look it all up again.
I switched to mozilla yesterday, and yes, bookmarks were moved. I don't know about mail.
Unfortunately, I just can't see dropping $2k on a new browser, not when I can download Firefox and get a better browser for free...
Yup. SHould work just fine.
I made the switch a few weeks back, Mozilla even grabbed my IE favorites - nice Browser indeed!
thanks
Mozilla Firefox Rocks. Use it on Windoze and Linux (SuSE). Hardly ever online in Windoze. Virus free for nine years.
Blessings, Bobo
I have of late been fighting Trojans, Worms and Viruses that seem to expolit the IE vulnerabilities. Not only myself but it seems everyone I know who had a Windows OS running IE. It really stinks, because I think IE and Microsoft has done a pretty good job with their software (Flame Away, I have got /root - Mandrake Flavor) it seems that there are forces at work who are trying their best to destroy Microsoft and anyone who uses their software. MS is trying to keep up, but how effective they will be remains to be seen.
As a little more than casual computer user, if you use MS OS's you better arm yourself with "SpyBot, AdAware, McAfee (or your choice of vaccinations) and a good Firewall to start, and for gawd sakes, update, update, update!
Sorry for the rant, all I was wondering if Mozilla 1.7 has anyway to act like Avant when you open multiple windows?
Well, we ought to be honest here -- IE and Microsoft systems are the primary targets right now, because they're the ones most people are using. Replace MS with somebody else, and you'll see hackers going after them, too.
I was skeptical at first as I still remember when Opera was just a text browser. It's come a LONG way since then.
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