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DJYSRV

A blog mostly about the Opera browser

Posts tagged with "security"

Browser developers fight phishers

Wednesday, 23. November 2005, 16:20:40

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Browser developers team up to thwart hackers at a security summit

By John Leyden - The Register

Published Wednesday 23rd November 2005 12:27 GMT

Security developers representing four of the major browser firms have met up to discuss how to combat security threats. Techies working on Internet Explorer, Mozilla/FireFox and Opera teamed up with the folks from Konqueror to discuss how to combat security risks posed by phishing, aging encryption ciphers and inconsistent SSL Certificate practices. A surprising amount of consensus emerged through the informal meeting, hosted by Konqueror's George Staikos in Toronto last week.

All agreed to push ahead with plans to introduce stronger encryption protocols. "With the availability of bot nets and massively distributed computing, current encryption standards are showing their age," Staikos writes. "Prompted by Opera, we are moving towards the removal of SSLv2 from our browsers. IE will disable SSLv2 in version 7 and it has been completely removed in the KDE 4 source tree already."

Colour coding the address bar on browsers, to indicate whether the digital certificate of a site has been validated, and Microsoft's development of an anti-phishing plug-in for its upcoming IE7 browser also got an informal thumbs up.

A fuller account of the meeting can be found on a KDE development blog here

Security threats drive users offline

Thursday, 27. October 2005, 13:50:44

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Threats drop Internet use

Web Threats Keep Users Away
October 26, 2005
By Matt Hines, eWeek

New research released by Consumer Reports WebWatch finds that U.S. Internet users are cutting back on the hours they spend online, shunning e-commerce and refusing to give out personal information as a result of the rising tide of Web-based crimes related to identity theft.

According to the WebWatch report, released Wednesday, 80 percent of all American Web surfers are at least somewhat concerned about the threat of identity theft posed by engaging in online activities.

As a result of those concerns, at least 30 percent of the 1,500 people interviewed for the survey said they have reduced the amount of time they access the Internet.

In addition to going online less frequently, 53 percent of the respondents told WebWatch that fears of ID theft have stopped them from giving out their personal information to Web sites and online marketers, while 25 percent said they are no longer purchasing items from e-commerce sites.

In a nod to related information security concerns, some 54 percent of the respondents who still buy items online said they now read Web sites' privacy policies before doing business with a company, and 29 percent said they have merely cut down on the amount of Web shopping they engage in.

New York-based WebWatch, a grant-funded project of the nonprofit Consumers Union, said that consumers have dramatically shifted their views of online activity over the last several years, becoming far more conservative about what constitutes safe online behavior.

Symantec's Browser Security Report Card

Tuesday, 20. September 2005, 02:55:47

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Some browsers get a passing grade, others flunk

John Stith
Webpro Security Forum 9/19/05

Internet security powerhouse Symantec released their "Symantec Internet Security Threat Report" today covering the first 6 months of 2005. The big story in this report is that many resources and tools traditionally thought of as secure and relatively problem free are just as open for attack as traditional Microsoft-based tools.

First on the list would be browsers. While Microsoft buries open-source based Mozilla in market share, for security vulnerabilities it appears to be reversed, at least in the first half of 2005. The report said that Mozilla had 25 vulnerabilities reported during this period, 18 of which were rated high severity. This is up from 44% during the second half of 2004.

Microsoft, on the other hand, had only 13 vendor confirmed vulnerabilities, down from the 31 in the second half of 2004. 62% of those 13 were considered high. Opera had 6 new vulnerabilities down from the 11 found in the previous reported period. Safari had 2 confirmed vulnerabilities and Konqueror also had 2 (this report was the first time Symantec included Konqueror).

This is significant because it show a marked improvement in Microsoft's efforts and it also shows that as Mozilla's market share has gone up, so have the attacks. It's a direct correlation to the level of usage of the browser.

Security fix issued for Firefox browser

Saturday, 10. September 2005, 19:00:58

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Mozilla issues security fix for Firefox 1.06

CNET News.com is reporting that details of an unpatched buffer overflow flaw in Mozilla Firefox have been made public. The security vulnerability is caused by a bug in the way long links with dashes are handled and is reported to allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on a victim's system.

The downloadable patch information for disabling IDN support is now available. It does not update the version number as originally planned, instead adding "(noIDN)" to the user-agent string.

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