firefox & mac under attack

deary65

Firefox and Mac security sanctuaries 'under attack'
Symantec attacks sacred cows
By John Leyden

Symantec has attacked the perceived security advantages of Firefox and Apple Macs by drawing unfavourable comparisons with Microsoft's software and describing Mac fans as living in a "false paradise". According to the latest edition of Symantec's Internet Security Threat Report, 25 vulnerabilities were disclosed for Mozilla browsers and 13 for Microsoft Internet Explorer in the first half of 2005....

http://www.theregister.com/2005/09/..._threat_report/

Rex_Mundi

Just a quick note about copying text from another website.

If you copy text from another website. You are meant to give a link to acknowledge where you copied it from. There are a couple of reasons for doing this.

A) It's good manners to acknowledge a source
It will protect you from charges of breaching copyright by the author. By acknowledging a source you can claim 'fair use' as a defence if the copyright owner (the author or publisher) decided to pursue you for breach of copyright (using their work without permission).
C) Somewhere in the rules (I can't find it at the moment) Martin asks us to do this if we quote from another site.

smcicr

as with everything - the more people that use / adopt it the more likely it is that someone out there will develop a virus for it.

obviously FF and Mac are now developing a big enough user base to be considered worth attacking - i guess it's no fun writing a virus for something with a hundred users when you could be spoiling the day for one hundred thousand etc etc

nothing that is (inter)networked is perfectly secure. ever. personally, even if FF had as many holes as IE i'd still choose it because, for me, it's functionality is better.

smcicr

it's from el reg: http://www.theregister.com/2005/09/19/symantec_threat_report/

Rex_Mundi

smcicr wrote:

it's from el reg: http://www.theregister.com/2005/09/19/symantec_threat_report/

I know. I recognised the article that I'd read through yesterday.

patflanel

And if I wrote AV software then I would exaggerate the risk too.......

jake_bullet_2

the 'safety by obscurity' has been done to death and proved time and time again to be rubbish, viruses have been written and deployed for far smaller user bases that the mac has.

Every now and then a company that *sells* av software pops it's head up and paints a grim picture that could, of course, be averted by using av software..

mac users aren't blase or ignorant about the potential for future trouble but we've been hearing the prophets of doom spout off for years now and still, nothing.

If it actually ever happens, we'll deal with it.

sra

***Board Guide Note***

I've cut the first post down to a short excerpt

hope you don't mind deary65

sra

"The fact that Mozilla browsers had the most vendor confirmed vulnerabilities over the past two six-month periods may suggest that Mozilla is currently acknowledging and fixing vulnerabilities more quickly than other vendors," Symantec wrote in the report.

The firm also said the overall increase in flaws uncovered in Web browsers could be in response to browser makers becoming more proactive in protecting their users."

that comes from the Betanews take on the story - don't know if it is mentioned in the Registers.


But I don't want to defend Firefox too much, No-one should feel too smug about the security of their fav browser. They all have their faults and vunerabilities